As part of its digitalization roadmap, Saudi Arabia’s leading retailer brand Jarir Bookstore will be using the ContentSquare analytics solution to study specific visitor segments and optimize the user experience on their online platforms.

Considered to be one of the largest retailers in the Arab World, Jarir Bookstore has opened more than 47 physical stores in GCC region since the 1970s. Jarir Bookstore offers a unique range of high-quality products ranging from office/school supplies, books, arts and crafts, to electronics and smart devices. Jarir Bookstore has recognized the importance of digitally transforming its offerings and services over the past few years – first by introducing digital books and launching an e-reader app (Jarir Reader) in 2013, followed by the launch of their official eCommerce site in 2016.

Jarir and ContentSquare

Using big data and artificial intelligence, ContentSquare precisely measures the web behavior of online visitors and makes it accessible to Jarir via its digital insights platform. “Through the use of our zoning technology, our solution breaks down each webpage and identifies problem areas. We measure everything from failed clicks to frustration points and hesitation time of online users. From experience, we know that addressing these problem areas leads to higher conversion rates. That’s what ContentSquare is about – offering a full-picture UX Analysis that helps people understand the reasons behind the behavior of online visitors, and why are they converting or not,” explains Disney Yapa, ContentSquare’s Sales Director MENA.

As one of the prominent members of the French tech startup scene, ContentSquare has helped more than 200 clients to optimize their digital channels, including Trolley in the UAE, Clarks, Harvey Nichols, Carrefour, L’Occitane and many others. In 2018, the company received an additional $42M in funding allowing it to invest further in developing its technology and offering its services to new markets – including the Middle East.

Since the partnership was finalized in the first quarter of the year, ContentSquare has worked closely with Jarir’s eCommerce team, training them extensively on the tool’s features.

That’s what ContentSquare is about – offering a full-picture UX Analysis that helps people understand the reasons behind the behavior of online visitors, and why are they converting or not.

Disney Yapa, ContentSquare

“We can’t be inside our customers’ brain, but ContentSquare is as close as we get.”

Andrea Ryberg, Rum21

Rum 21 has gone through a number of changes since its early days. Acquired by furniture e-commerce giant RoyalDesign in 2014, what used to be a family-owned enterprise now has access to large-scale resources. In 2018, it partnered with UX Analytics company ContentSquare to really deep-dive into getting to know their customers and improving their online journey,

ContentSquare Marketing Manager Camila Florez sat down with Rum 21 e-Commerce Manager Andrea Ryberg to discuss these changes and how the site seeks to ‘balance information with inspiration’.

How would you define Rum 21 and how is it different from other companies?

We aspire to be a more personal company that has a high level of trust with customers. Being owned by RoyalDesign, we do have the advantages of having the larger supply chain, the sizeable warehouse, and other resources. But we want our site to feel straightforward and trustworthy. We try to be very transparent and give a full picture of the product and who we are. Furthermore, we believe customer service is one of the main pillars of our business.

Who is the primary customer of Rum21 and how would you distinguish them from Royal Design customers?

With segmentation analysis, we can see that our customer is primarily a woman, relatively young, and we also see that our average order values are higher. We need to dig more into that, but there’s definitely a perceived difference between our two brands and we work on maintaining that. Rum21 is a bit more premium in terms of product offering.

How do you identify these customers and how do you cater to them differently?

We have customers in various stages of the funnel on our site, so we really need to accommodate all types of customers. To do that, we strive to offer a mix of inspiration and information. As we’ve seen with ContentSquare, we have the largest number of visitors coming straight to the product page. These customers generally come from Google or through paid click, indicating they already know what they are looking for and therefore are quite far down in the funnel. So, in that stage, inspiration is still important, but we need to focus on the information part.
On the other hand, if a customer is landing on the homepage and hasn’t fully decided yet what they want, the inspirational part needs to be more emphasized.

So you began using the ContentSquare tool in 2018. How do you find the solution so far and how does it compare to the tools you were using prior? 

Well, we know what sells and what doesn’t, and we wanted to know why. We were using Google Analytics for a long time, and we still do, but it’s more useful for looking at traffic and straight sales figures. Yes, you can see the clicks on the pages, or how popular different pages are, but you can’t really see the navigation paths and what the customers look at and for how long. Our marketing department uses it much more than I do now.

The difference is that ContentSquare brings you the behavior part. We can really learn why a customer clicks on something or why they don’t. That was something that I could only make assumptions about before. We can’t be inside our customers’ brain, but the insights we get from ContentSquare are as close as we can get. It’s really been interesting for us.

How do you use or interact with the solution on a regular basis?

It depends on what I’m looking for. Usually, I go on the dashboard and have a quick overview. I also merchandise the site and the homepage, so I love looking at how the different elements on it are performing, that’s really interesting. Also, I look at the Customer Journey Analytics to get a better understanding of the actual customer journey. I use the solution in different ways. Our IT and Content Managers also use it.

How has the tool changed the way you carry out your job?

Well, it’s a lot easier now to understand what must be prioritized, because I can see for example what a certain pain point does to the actual conversion rate. I work a lot with the developers, so this is really handy. Before I would come to them with suggestions or let them know what my personal preferences are. Now I come to them with data, I know that this is what we need to do. This is a massive advantage!

What would you say is the biggest insight that you gained from ContentSquare that you couldn’t have before?

Lots of things, actually. For us, it was good to realize that the locations on the homepage where we put our prime offers weren’t even visible to many of our customers and visitors. Now we changed the whole layout of the homepage and we’re still looking at how that has affected our customers’ behavior.
We also know now that our search function is really one of the most used functions and most clicked elements. We identified that the float time is quite high on the search bar, so we changed and clarified the CTA. We could also see that we had customers starting to type on the search bar, and when the actual search pop up would appear, it covers it. So you couldn’t really see what you were typing. We changed that because obviously, we saw that we lost customers through this frustration point.
We have also identified pain points on our product and cart pages… we have so much work to do still!

How do you see the partnership between ContentSquare and Rum21 moving forward?

I feel from our collaboration that ContentSquare – especially with Lovisa, the Nordics Customer Success Manager with whom we work very closely – encourages and pushes us to examine the elements on our website more in detail. And ContentSquare as a tool always has a new update or feature coming out. I feel like they’re really on their toes when it comes to developing the tool. As for Rum 21, we will never stop evolving either. We always need to adapt to the customer. There are so many new features and technologies that are emerging every day; working with ContentSquare is definitely going to help us to be able to keep up with that. It makes it a lot more effortless to deal with data and analysis. We can get the answers so much quicker. Whether we’re doing a complete redesign work or simply small adjustments, we will always find room for continued growth together.

What are your next steps in terms of optimization?

First of all, we’re going to develop the search function a bit more and make it faster. And we’re looking at that now. It would be interesting to look at the Cart page and follow up on the insights that we have. We discovered for example that we have a lot of exit points in the Cart that we want to keep to a strict minimum.
There are also features in the solution that we haven’t maximized yet, like the AI notifications. I also think there’s room for improvement in terms of having even more of our teams use the tool. For now, people have a lot on their plates, but it would be very helpful to really buckle down and have our Category and Content teams spend more time to gather insights from the tool as well and determine what to do with those insights. Those are the things we are working on.

If there’s one sentence that you would use to describe ContentSquare and the work it has done for Rum21, what would it be?

Well, it would be difficult to put it in just one line. But all we ever strive to do in this business is to understand the customer. We might know what we want to sell, but it’s so important to understand what the customer actually wants and how they want to interact. To sum it up, this is the only solution that primarily gives us that data. We simply couldn’t do that with the tools that we used before ContentSquare.