The company
Skincare brand fresh harnesses nature’s potency from around the world to awaken senses and transform skin. The brand was founded as a shop in 1991 by Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg, creative visionaries driven by their curiosity about natural time-honored remedies and extraordinary experiences for the skin. An LVMH Maison since 2000, fresh is now a global company based in New York offering skincare, lip care, bodycare, and fragrance in over 25 countries.
Fresh has been a success story in the retail space for the past three decades, with its products stocked in beauty retailers, department stores, and standalone boutiques.
As the business grows, direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce expansion is top of mind. The business's goal now is to bring the same level of customer experience and brand desirability from physical stores to the digital realm.
To achieve this goal, Global Ecommerce Director Geraldine Servouze is using Contentsquare.
The challenge
As fresh focused its efforts on reinforcing its digital expansion, Geraldine’s ecommerce team needed to deliver the customer-centric experiences the company's online audience truly desired.
Traditional analytics tools helped them understand what happened on their website—but this was only half the puzzle. Numbers alone didn’t provide insight into real users’ behaviors, journeys, and experiences.
When Google Analytics revealed unexpected trends in critical metrics during product launches and campaigns, Geraldine's team needed a way to know what customers were actually doing and experiencing on their site. They also required an additional layer of qualitative insights when conducting A/B tests or conversion rate optimization (CRO) audits.
And that's where Contentsquare came in.
For me, Contentsquare’s biggest impact is making all our markets more data-driven. This is the most important thing to us: ensuring we take decisions based on data. Contentsquare educates our markets and ecommerce leaders about the value of relying on data.
The solution
Geraldine and her team rely on Contentsquare’s all-in-one Experience Intelligence platform to improve fresh's website user experience (UX).
As a loyal Contentsquare user since 2017, Geraldine has witnessed the immense value of understanding real user behaviors. Using Contentsquare has enabled her team to find and fix numerous issues negatively impacting the customer journey over the years, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Over time, the platform has proven itself to be the ultimate solution for Geraldine to meet her main objectives in 3 key ways.
1. Increasing add-to-cart rate for new products
As fresh grows, the company continuously adds new products to its line. Gathering data from each product launch helps the team understand why some new products outperform others and optimize pages based on these insights.
When fresh launched a new skincare product on its website, Google Analytics data showed that its add-to-cart rate was significantly lower than average, impacting conversions.
The ecommerce team needed additional context. Contentsquare provided it by revealing that the exit rate on this particular product page was higher than expected. Additionally, Contentsquare showed that many users would jump back and forth between the product page and the product listing page (which displayed all the products in a specific category).
The team then used Contentsquare to confirm that this puzzling behavior wasn’t present on other product pages—and used these insights to get buy-in for investigating further and troubleshooting the issue.
In order to understand if a product is working well or not, Contentsquare helps us deep-dive into why people are buying this product or not compared to another.
2. Identifying and optimizing critical areas of the customer journey
The fresh team’s mission to build a more intuitive ecommerce journey for the company's customers means they’re constantly finding new ways to optimize.
Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability (with its unique ‘sunburst’ visualization) helps them do this by giving them an instant, bird’s-eye overview of how users navigate through the Fresh website.
At a glance, they can see where users bounce, exit or loop, enabling them to identify key areas for improvement.
Using Contentsquare’s Zone-Based Heatmaps capability makes it easy for the team to analyze and understand the behavior of visitors on individual pages within the journey—showing them where users click, scroll, and hover.
fresh’s use of these capabilities has led to dozens of simple yet impactful discoveries—for example, of homepage content that is being overlooked by customers and unnecessary menu items causing confusion.
The fresh team uses these insights to inform homepage hierarchy, remove redundant information, and streamline the overall customer journey.
![[Visual] Zoning and Heatmaps](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/1fY6bBg1dnmmchw0aGq0u7/22f31b8e8a5bd586dce9a6df783184a1/Screenshot_2024-11-04_at_18.31.54.png?w=3840&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
With the sunburst journey analysis, you have the possibility to really dive deep into all the steps and better understand the customer journey. And Contentsquare can also help us to know which content we push—for example, on the homepage, we use Zone-Based Heatmaps to see which content is performing the best, where people click and where they do not click."
3. Improving collaboration across teams and markets
DXA via Contentsquare has been a game-changer for the fresh team, enabling them to learn from their consumers and foster a culture of customer-centricity across teams, functions, and markets.
Contentsquare’s visual tools help fresh’s nine eCommerce locales stay aligned and consistent when it matters most.
A recent example was provided by a Contentsquare analysis the team conducted across regions during the holiday season. Data showed that content at the bottom of the page was not being clicked. This finding prompted these teams to declutter their pages and revert to the more effective, user-friendly homepage hierarchy other teams used.
By sharing data insight cross-functionally, the fresh team has cemented Contentsquare as an invaluable part of its tech stack.
During the high-traffic holiday season, some of our ecommerce regions had three content slots on their website homepage, while others had seven. We did an analysis on the countries with more content slots, and realized that three out of seven didn't provide any revenue. That’s how we came to the conclusion to cut three of them and streamline the customer journey.
The results
At a time when fresh’s ecommerce growth matters more than ever, Contentsquare is helping the Global Digital team obtain the right data to plan A/B tests that have a notable impact on the business’s bottom line.
Instead of looking at what competitors are doing and making changes that align with ‘best practices’, the fresh team charts its own course based on insights from real customers—the most valuable data they have access to.
