Contentsquare is pleased to announce that in January 2019, it will join the ranks of businesses in residence at this year’s NRF, the world’s largest retail exhibition and trade show.

Contentsquare will be making its NRF debut as part of a delegation of French startups cherry-picked by Business France, a French government agency with the mission to promote French companies globally.

The Contentsquare team will be sharing a kiosk with 18 other leading French startups — including e-payments processor Wordline — selected by Business France for their innovation and vision. Contentsquare is included as part of the “Mature” section of startups, defined as fulfilling two criteria: possessing French and global clients, along with a proven strategy for growth in the US.

As well as bringing word-of-mouth exposure to an audience of thousands, it will hold panels with its partners and clients in two breakfast events. Contentsquare’s very own Chief Strategy & Partnership Officer, Jean-Marc Bellaiche is set to speak at these networking events, which will serve as an interchange of best practices for digital experience development.

The event, which will run from January 13-15th at Javits Center in New York City, will host thousands of businesses, including a slew of big brands across industries. These industries span a wide breadth of categories, including technology, grocery, fashion, automotive, fundraising and many others.

Joining the annual conference will be a bevy of chains, startups, manufacturers and other vendors. Having made a splash in the SaaS scene with its digital insights platform, Contentsquare, alongside other startups, will take part in discussions on tackling e-commerce challenges and digitally proofing the retail experience.

Along with the kiosk, which will be manned by Contentsquare’s sales and marketing teams, two breakfast events will be held. On Sunday, January 13th, a business breakfast will be held at Toro NYC in partnership with Business France and the e-payments experts at Worldline.

On Monday, January 14th, Contentsquare will host a champagne breakfast at Magic Hour, featuring a special guest speaker from its client GoPro.com. Later in the evening, Contentsquare will participate at the exclusive, annual retail gala hosted by business network French Founders. During the gala, Contentsquare will be present in an interactive branded space, in which Jean-Marc Bellaiche is set to partake in a panel on “The Rise of Experiential Retail” alongside major brands like Casper and Mars.

NRF will allow Contentsquare to connect with existing clients and meet face to face with digital leaders looking to harness the power of behavioral data. The kiosks are open for all attendees to visit, and the team is excited to meet attendees, participants and all the movers and shakers who are helping shape the future of retail.

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.

Convincing shoppers to add to cart is just one of the daily challenges of digital marketing teams everywhere – the real concern is making sure digital journeys end in conversion.

A ContentSquare survey of US consumers aged 18 to 65 found that 81% of shoppers had abandoned their cart at least once in their lifetime.

The 25-34 age group has the biggest tendency for cart abandonment (21%), followed by the 35-44 (20%) and 45 to 54 age groups (13%). The three most frequently abandoned item categories are clothing (40%), tech products (18%) and home ware (16%).

But what exactly causes someone to spend time filling their basket, only to get cold feet at the very last minute?

Not surprisingly, ‘money’ tops the list of reasons, with 74% of surveyed consumers citing price as the biggest obstacle to conversion. Others fill up their cart but simply can’t make their mind up once they get to checkout – with 8.9% of consumers quoting ‘too many options’ as their main reason for not following through on a purchase. For 7.95% of consumer, it’s ‘time’ (or presumably, running out of it) that hinders conversion.

THE THREE MOST FREQUENTLY ABANDONED ITEM CATEGORIES ARE CLOTHING (40%), TECH PRODUCTS (18%) AND HOME WARE (16%).

In fourth place is ‘a poor online experience,’ with 7.30% of shoppers blaming an underwhelming User Experience (UX) for their desertion.

There are many levels of engagement to any digital journey, and the challenge for brands is to meet prospects’ needs every step of the way. Disruptors like Amazon have mastered the art of competitive pricing, but there is still much brands can do to incentivize consumers, including offering free shipping, promotions and exclusive member deals.

Behavioral insights that can identify friction points along the customer journey and tell you why users are frustrated will help your teams roll out the optimizations that will keep visitors engaged until the moment of purchase.

Love is in the air and on the shelves of every drugstore across the US. Online retailers are also poised for a little customer love this week, as lovers everywhere rush to order flowers, chocolates and other gifts for their significant other.

Curious to find out which country leads the way when it comes to romance, our data experts in France, the UK and the USA analyzed the digital behavior of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen to settle the debate once and for all.

If you think you know who spends the most on their sweetheart and who converts the most for love, take our Valentine’s Faceoff quiz!

The decline of brick-and-mortar stores in favor of digital shopping platforms is inspiring businesses everywhere to improve their customers’ online experience.

Credit Suisse estimates that there could be more than 8,640 store closures this year, breaking the 2008 record of approximately 6,200 store closures. Meanwhile, the US Census Bureau has recorded a 0.8% increase in consumer spending in November 2017 (a 5.8% hike from the previous year), showing that spending is not the factor.

According to McKinsey & Company, “digital’s share of total retail sales in the United States has been growing by about 15% annually over the past 5-years.” For mobile channels, the growth is +25% in 2017 alone. Today, 60% of Americans have smartphones, and 80% of them shop with their device.

Companies that want to capitalize on this shift need to consider the following 4 trends as they prepare for the future:

1: Changing Face of the Consumer

Meet Generation Z, the first generation of digital natives. Born into a world of smartphones and streaming, they have very different needs than their forebears.

2: New Patterns of Personal Consumption

Customer expectations are changing fast and often. Today’s shoppers are looking to fit shopping around their busy lives – not the other way round.

3: Technological Advancements

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and increasingly sophisticated analytics solutions are revolutionizing the landscape of online business.

4: Structural Industry Shifts

The recent Amazon takeover of Whole Foods is just one example of how businesses are embracing the digital revolution, and shifting their focus to online.

DIGITAL USER EXPERIENCE (UX) PLAYS A KEY ROLE IN THE ONGOING CHANGES TO THE CULTURE OF HOW PEOPLE SHOP.

All pointing to the same conclusion: that digital User Experience (UX) plays a key role in the ongoing changes to the culture of how people shop.

In fact, it has widely been reported that UX is the new salesperson. In the past, the consumer would enter a store, and be greeted and advised by a sales assistant. Based on this interaction, the salesperson would assess the customer’s needs and goals, and adapt the experience accordingly. Today’s online customer expects that same level of experience, hence the development of AI and bots to achieve personalized, more human customer journeys.

But personalizing journeys implies knowing your customer inside out. Enter digital experience analytics. These allow you to measure and compare traffic and engagement from one country to another, one device to another, taking into account factors like time of day, mood, reason for visiting your site, and source of origin (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc), to name a few. With behavioral data in their arsenal, digital teams are now able to understand why and how prospects use their platforms, and can optimize their sites accordingly.

And with data-driven insights into the real behavior of their digital customers, companies can identify pain points on their platforms, prioritize optimization efforts, and in turn achieve real conversion growth.

Marcus Magarian is a Business Developer in ContentSquare. Reach out to talk about how behavioral data can help your business prepare for the future of digital commerce: marcus@contentsquare.com

You may think you know your nephew well, but he thinks that sweater you gave him is hideous. And let’s be real – no one needs three scented candles. As consumers rush to return or exchange unwanted items in the post-holiday season, terms and conditions pages see a huge spike in traffic. And don’t forget, traffic is traffic, whether they keep the sweater or not.

Here’s your chance to remove the hassle from a traditionally irksome holiday rite. Make sure your customers don’t have to go digging for key information, and guide them through the returns and exchange process with clear, visual prompts. And of course, while they’re on your platform, why not take the opportunity to unveil new items and entice them with seasonal discounts.

At the very top of the holiday gift list, you’ll find cosmetics and liquor. Data shows that the conversion rate for makeup, skincare and fragrance almost triples on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and, crucially, remains pretty high until mid-January. In fact, this is the only sector where retailers sell more during the post-holiday season than they do during the pre-holiday season – reflecting the fact that, once hooked, many consumers repeat-buy these products.

Another thing to keep in mind when promoting cosmetics on your platform is that shoppers favor gift sets over individual items – during the holiday season, gift boxes get double the recorded conversion rate than they do the rest of the year. When it comes to gift-giving, in general, buyers want to multiply their chances of getting it right!