Leveraging CX to optimize holiday shopping

Optimizing the Gift Guide

The Challenge

Every year in October, The North Face launches an online Gift Guide to help shoppers navigate the gift-giving season. As the main retail event of the year, the lead-up to the holidays is a major source of digital revenue for the brand, and getting it wrong is simply not an option.

To reap the most gains out of the Gift Guide and remove any friction points it was causing for customers, The North Face put to use our digital experience insights. Entering the peak holiday season with a thorough analysis of how site visitors interact with the Gift Guide gave The North Face a major advantage, inevitably allowing it to avert UX issues as the holiday gifting campaign was approaching.

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What’s great about Contentsquare is that the insights are visual and extremely easy to digest. It’s particularly helpful to be able to give the creative or leadership team a clear picture of pain points and successes — it helps secure immediate buy-in and significantly reduces time to action, meaning we don’t miss out on potential sales."
The North Face

Lisa Skowrup

Senior Manager, Site Experience
The North Face

The Methodology

The North Face turned to our unique suite of metrics and UX measuring capabilities to dictate its optimization plan for the holiday shopping season, starting with the Gift Guide. As the guide is a catalog consisting of a vast collection of merchandise, The North Face analyzed its user behavior on a per-page basis.

The gear company used our unique metrics for a comprehensive analysis of the gift guide’s performance. Particularly, they studied exposure rate, click recurrence, click-through rate, each of which provided distinct pieces of data on how visitors were interacting with the guide.

This analysis informed the brand on where customers were struggling and which page elements were hindering conversions. For example, a low exposure rate of the category CTAs imparted the need to move them above the fold. A high click recurrence showed that the entirety of the hero image wasn’t clickable, telling the brand to make it so.

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Contentsquare provides us with unique KPIs such as attractiveness rate and click recurrence to measure our storytelling, reduce friction, and improve the experience."
The North Face

Rachel Bonn

Content Manager, E-Commerce, The North Face

The Outcome

Understanding user behavior on the Gift Guide granted The North Face the intelligence is required to move forward with any changes to its UX. Moving the CTAs above the fold increased their exposure rate by a lofty 50%. Rendering the entire banner image clickable halved the click recurrence rate. The analysis also provided more UX changes that optimized the user experience.