The company
Hotel Chocolat is the UK’s premier luxury chocolate brand with 126 stores, as well as cafés, restaurants, outlets, and factory stores.
With a small digital team, Hotel Chocolat relies on Contentsquare across the board when it comes to leveraging data to make better business decisions. “We are a very small but data-driven team,” Daniel Jinkerson, eCommerce Assistant says.
Even making small changes to your website can have a big impact on the amount of customers who contact the business. That’s why we’ll use zoning analysis in Contentsquare to explain the rationale behind these decisions.
Resolving UX issues starts with aligning teams around data
“Lots of different teams at Hotel Chocolat use Contentsquare, from the UX team to the CRO team. Even our digital designers have access to Contentsquare and will occasionally go in and check stuff on there.”
While the UX and eCommerce teams use Contentsquare on a daily or weekly basis to conduct their own work, they also use data from Contentsquare to explain website changes to the rest of the business.
Daniel shares three different optimizations the digital team has made across their site using Contentsquare's Experience Intelligence platform.
UX Issue 1: rage clicks on add-to-basket CTAs
Using Contentsquare, Hotel Chocolat’s digital team noticed that customers were having trouble buying one of the company’s most popular products: the Velvetiser.
“Doing some routine analysis of the Velvetiser product detail page (PDP), we found that the add to basket CTA and optional add-ons had really high click rates,” said Daniel. “This seemed like a really positive thing. But as we started to dive a little bit deeper, we noticed there were some issues.”
Hotel Chocolat Velvetrizer product page
The solution
Using frustration score, the digital team noticed that the add-to-basket CTA had a high recurrence rate and a high number of rage clicks–when users show their frustration by repeatedly clicking an element in a website or app).
The team used the Session Repay capability to see exactly what was going wrong and discovered that the PDP forced customers to preselect a color before other elements on the page were clickable.
The team responded by making the PDP preselect the color based on where the user had come from. As Daniel explained: “If they came from a charcoal link, the PDP would preselect charcoal. That instantly made these elements clickable and reduced rage clicks completely.”
The results
The result of these changes was a reduction in “missed opportunity”—a score which indicates lost revenue in Contentsquare—down to zero.
UX Issue 2: high bounce rate on blog pages
Hotel Chocolat used Contentsquare to optimize its SEO journeys. Daniel’s team became determined to do this after finding that the brand’s blogs had an average bounce rate of 82%—and what’s more, that the traffic that didn’t bounce from the blogs subsequently had a low conversion rate.
This was bad news, because weekly analysis showed that 3.8% of all Hotel Chocolat’s traffic was entering the site via these blog pages—and that proportion was growing.
“We had to work out where that traffic wanted to go, and make it easier for users to get there,” Daniel says.
The solution
The digital team used Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis to address the issue. This analysis showed them that users were tending to going from blog posts to PDPs, Product Listing Pages (PLPs) or the website’s Search bar.
Using Impact Qualification, the team saw that the best-performing journeys were those where users went to the PLPs. Further analysis showed which four specific PLP journeys led to higher conversions. The team then added these conversion-driving PLPs as quick links at the bottom of blog pages and ran a series of A/B tests to see which performed best.
The results
Simply by adding these links, Daniel’s team soon saw a decreased average bounce rate across blog pages, a higher average order value (AOV) from SEO traffic, and an increase in session time.
“Bear in mind that our blogs tend to be quite long, so these links only have an exposure rate of 30% or less. Despite that, this zone still had a high attractiveness rate and conversion rate per click,” Daniel says.
We’ve been using Contentsquare for years to align all our teams and optimize our digital experience,and that’s only going to continue. The more wins we have, the more opportunities we see to optimize further."
UX Issue 3: user friction in the Contact Us form
Hotel Chocolat's customers were complaining about their Contact Us form being confusing and difficult to fill in.
Assessing the form, the UX team realized that it had low color contrast, unclear steps, and poor signposting to FAQs which could resolve customers’ queries.
Hotel Chocolat Contact Us form before (left) and after (right) optimization
The solution
The team used Heatmaps and Form Analysis to identify the exact areas where customers were falling off the form and experiencing frustrations. Based on the findings, the team then ran a series of A/B tests to try and improve the form.
They improved the contrast, making the form easier to read; they numbered the steps, so it was clear in what order the form needed to be filled in.
But the change that had the biggest impact was highlighting FAQs more clearly throughout the form.
The results
“The results of these changes were remarkable and represented a huge business win,” says Daniel.
Following these data-driven optimizations, the team saw a decrease in form submissions and a higher drop off rate, as well as a higher click rate through to the relevant FAQs. Rather than filling in the form, resulting in time-consuming customer service responses, customers were instead opting to self-serve and find the answers themselves.
What's next
“We believe that Hotel Chocolat and Contentsquare are a match made in heaven,” said Daniel. “We’ve been using Contentsquare for years to align all our teams and optimize our digital experience, and that is only going to continue. The more wins we have, the more opportunities we see to optimize things still further.”
The company is continuing to test and optimize user journeys from SEO traffic, continuously analyzing data to see where they can improve their UX and continuously assessing where best to focus their time and resources when it comes to optimizing AOV.
The digital team is always iterating to see how we can improve the experience for users, and Contentsquare is a big part of that process of iteration for us.
