How to improve digital customer experience – 3 tips from Naked Wines

author

Wei Ni Neo

February 14, 2022 | 5 min read

Last Updated: Feb 14, 2022


Anna Robins, Head of Category & Merchandising at Naked Wines, the world’s largest direct-to-consumer wine subscription service company, shares her top tips for ensuring customers have the best digital experience possible

3 key elements Naked Wines uses to improve the digital customer experience

Naked Wines use a clear 3-step approach to improve their customer journeys and optimize their digital customer experiences using Contentsquare Insights:

  • Investigation
  • Insights to Action
  • Tools & Frameworks

1. Investigation: Data-based approach to understanding key customer journeys

Naked Wines discovered that data investigation was a great balance between the time spent going through data and the overall return on investment. They zeroed in on three lenses, which captured the essence of customer experience and provided them with a clear picture of where they should focus their efforts.

Presentation slide showing the three phases of digital CX data investigation

  • The first was to analyze customer journeys. Naked Wines used multiple hypotheses from the most common paths to purchase, to the data which showed their sticky points, top visited pages, and pages with the highest bounce rates. This was crucial to understanding which customer journeys they should focus on. 
  • Following that, they’ve also reviewed their key landing pages. A dashboard was created specifically for their top 10 landing pages to identify pages that were under or over-indexing in conversion rates. That informed them of the landing pages with under-indexing conversion rates that needed to be optimized.
  • The last lens was zoning the core elements of landing pages. After Naked Wines identified the sites with underperforming conversion rates, they zoned those landing pages with Contentsquare’s zone-based heatmapping tool to figure out why. They checked core elements in the page such as navigation filters, sticky points which may cause friction, and elements of the page that made the transaction process intuitive and easy for users.

2. Insight to Action:  Leveraging learnings to lift and fix the experience

Anna shared 3 examples of how her team improved their customer experience – through customer journeys, key landing pages, and increasing engagement. 

Example 1: Customer Journeys

For new customer journeys, Anna’s team discovered that the more pages new customers visited, the lower their conversion rate. The reason? Simply because these new customers tended to get lost in their website, and were not at the stage that Naked Wines needed to tell them their whole story. Instead, the company wanted to keep them in their attractive front introductory offer.

Presentation slide with Naked Wines website showing how they reduced customer friction

A quick insight they turned over almost overnight was simplifying their navigation menu. Instead of showing new visitors different wine selections upfront, new visitors will be directed to the introductory offer to prevent them from getting lost on-site. On the small chance that they navigate away, another menu is reintroduced to convert them back to the introductory offer.

As a result, users are kept in the life cycle stage where they belong as new customers. Over the last few months, this simple change resulted in a 5% increase in conversion.

 

Example 2: Key Landing Pages

After a user successfully becomes a member with Naked Wines, the next stage in the customer journey is to drive lifetime value. They identified a key landing page that was one of the top 10 most visited pages, but had a suboptimal conversion rate. Immediate action was taken to divert traffic away from the page. The team fixed the URL until they had time to conduct a site triage to figure out the reason behind the low conversion rates. 

Presentation slide on how Naked Wines improved the CX on their Key Landing Pages

Using Contentsquare’s zone-based heatmapping tool, the team found several minor changes that needed to be made to the navigation and naming. However, what really stood out was the impact of the products that were out-of-stock.

Naked wines used Contentsquare’s data to identify the exact dollar size of impact for every person that hovered over out-of-stock products but didn’t click to convert. Working with independent winemakers with a slower production pace, also means that restocking usually takes about 6 months. Hence, a different solution was needed.

To fix this issue, Naked Wines launched a new pre-order function for products with a loyal following. While it seemed like a fairly intuitive and easy thing to carry out, Anna explained that the key ingredient was the data which showed a clear impact on revenue. This enabled her to present a business case to get more resources to solve this issue – one being a new member in the team to oversee the new pre-order function.

From there, Naked Wines launched their first major Christmas pre-order this December, which drove incremental growth and conversion on the core landing page. 

Example 3: Increasing Customer Engagement 

As a subscription company, it’s imperative that Naked Wines has continuous customer engagement and dwell time. Slowing down the customer on-site, viewing numerous pages, and is highly engaged with the content is important to share Naked Wines’ story and their unique value in disrupting the wine industry. 

So having a top-down perspective of customer journeys, bounce rates, and content was crucial to leverage their campaigns.

One campaign Naked Wines wanted to share with their customers was ‘Stop the Squeeze’, a large fund that supported 11 of their independent winemakers greatly affected by China’s wine tariffs. The company bought approximately 280,000 of their bottles which generated over $2 million in revenue.

Presentation slide with Naked Wines Campaign that increased engagement

But how would they share it with their customers without compromising conversion rates? Throughout the 10-week campaign, Naked Wines reviewed elements with high dwell times, high float times, attractive parts of the page that were converted, etc. It helped them to understand where their story belonged in the navigation menu and ensured that customers were viewing content at a time where it would deepen their relationship with the company.

Their efforts paid off — customers were spending twice as long engaging with the campaign content compared to their standard case offers.

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3. Tools and Frameworks: Unlocking the full potential of the data 

With big data comes big responsibility. Having tools and systems in place to transact the data is important to continuously improve their customer experience. 

Anna’s team has found the perfect blend of optimizing user experiences:

  • Data democratization
  • Simplifying systematically 
  • Building a roadmap 

Naked Wines has democratized the data by having multiple functions in the company use Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform. With Contentsquare’s simple yet visual interface, any function can easily digest the data and insights from their site. This has moved the company to a more data-backed approach when assessing ideas systematically against the ease versus impact metric.

Being a global company, it’s critical that all global teams are heard. And by assessing all of their ideas using the same metric, the process is simplified, which helped to easily identify the biggest wins.

Streamlining the decision-making process has helped the company build out their strategic roadmap. This roadmap is shared across the company, where every employee can view the company’s priorities to enhance their customer experience.

Anna’s key takeaways for improving digital CX

Presentation slide with three points in blue bubbles on how to improve CX

  1. Anna quotes from W. Edwards Deming “Without data you’re just another person with an opinion”. For the company to support your ideas and to give you the resources to invest in your beliefs, the biggest help you can get is from data. 
  2. Turn insights into action. Make sure that you’re asking the right questions of the data to help you quickly move from the investigation stage to action.
  3. You MUST have an underpinning framework to get the right people to use the data properly and ensure your systems’ true potential is unlocked.