The company
Founded in 2014, Rhone is a premium activewear retailer that bridges the gap between big box stores and high-end yoga brands. Rhone’s best-in-class products are sold in the brand’s eleven retail stores, gyms and specialty stores across the US, and—of course—online, through the brand’s website.
Responsible for driving those onlines sales—and refining and evolving the brand’s digital customer experience—is Sarah Massey, Director of eCommerce.
“We’re always trying to put the customer first, whether that’s in our stores or on our website,” says Sarah. “Our aim is to establish really loyal experiences and personalized opportunities in-store and online.”
To put the customer first, you have to know the customer. In the digital world, this means understanding how visitors to your website are behaving—and, therefore, feeling about your experience.
And that’s a job for digital experience analytics—courtesy of Contentsquare.
The challenge
Prior to implementing Contentsquare, Sarah’s team was assessing visitor behavior using a severely limited behavioral analytics tool.
This tool made it challenging both to understand how Rhone’s website content was performing and to share data throughout the organization. This limited the impact that the eCommerce team’s findings and initiatives could have, both at an executive and organization-wide level.
Sarah’s team urgently needed access to shareable customer behavior insights to guide and garner support for their optimization efforts—particularly during peak seasons, when it’s vital to understand where (and why) content is and isn’t working so the brand can take full advantage of an influx of seasonal traffic.
The solution
Contentsquare has made it easy for Sarah’s team to report on the behavior of Rhone’s site users and the performance of specific pages, page elements and campaigns.
They make extensive use of Contentsquare’s page comparator capability—to, for example, compare the performance of 15 landing pages created for the brand’s influencer program.
They also use Zone-Based Heatmaps to understand how effectively pages (and elements within pages) are driving revenue and conversion.
These insights help to prove (or disprove) hypotheses the team have about the most effective way to encourage customers to convert, such as the hypothesis that male shoppers, specifically, need additional guidance through their shopping experience.
“We were able to test this out by adding buyer’s guides to a handful of our male collection pages and analyzing their performance in Contentsquare,” says Sarah. “This analysis showed us that those buyer’s guides significantly improved revenue.”
Crucially, they’re able to share great insights like this with the rest of the business in visually striking and easily comprehensible form.
“Contentsquare is Rhone’s single source of truth for content and site performance,” says Sarah. “With Contentsquare, we’re now able to share digestible information with other teams, including our executive team. Plus, we can share it fast—we definitely save time on reporting."
To demonstrate how Contentsquare has helped Rhone’s eCommerce team strengthen its digital customer experience, improve its site performance and smash its sales targets, let’s look at how Rhone has used Contentsquare to make the most of peak season traffic.
With Contentsquare, we’re now able to share digestible information with other teams, including our executive team. Plus, we can share it fast—we definitely save time on reporting."
Achieving peak performance at peak season
Peak seasons bring increased consumer spending, and increased pressure on ecommerce teams to attract and convert customers with optimized digital experiences.
And that pressure has only increased in recent years, thanks to the pandemic and post-pandemic state of economic uncertainty—as Sarah explains:
“The summer was definitely slower for a lot of brands, and going into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a lot of retailers were nervous to see how everything would perform. There was a lot of pressure on the event.”
It’s at times like these that the rich contextual insights into visitor behavior and content performance that Contentsquare unlocks come in particularly handy.
“Throughout the season, we worked really closely with Contentsquare to set up reports that would let us know how well everything was performing on site, and alert us whenever there was an issue that might impact customer experience or performance,” says Sarah.
Moreover, Contentsquare’s Benchmarks capability enabled Sarah’s team to compare their peak season performance to that of the competition, in real-time.
“Over Black Friday weekend, we used Benchmarks to get a read into how we were converting in comparison to our competitors and to top performers in Retail,” says Sarah.
“We learned that we had a very impressive conversion rate—but also that our bounce rate was higher than many websites we were competing against.”
Sarah’s team dug into this insight using Contentsquare and discovered that the bounce rate was likely being impacted by site speed issues, specifically around videos embedded in Rhone’s product description pages (PDPs).
“We saw performance issues on one of our top-trafficked PDPs—our slim-fit commuter shirt—that were probably leading to bounces,” explains Sarah.
“We realized that we had a video set on autoplay on this page and that it would be better, from a performance perspective, to compress the video and have it set to ‘click to play’,” she continues. “Now we know this, we can apply the learning to future campaigns where video content is used to support big launches.”
“When we first partnered with Contentsquare, it was just our team using it. But now other teams are beginning to take advantage of it—from across brand marketing, CRM, performance marketing and customer service development."
The results
With Contentsquare’s help, Rhone had an extremely successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday event. They exceeded their targets and saw sales go up 37%, year-on-year.
Results like this have secured Contentsquare’s place as an indispensable tool in the eCommerce team’s digital stack—and smoothed the way for its adoption by other teams across the business.
“When we first partnered with Contentsquare, it was just our team using it,” says Sarah. “But now other teams are beginning to take advantage of it—from across brand marketing, CRM, performance marketing and customer service development.”
What's next
Sarah’s eCommerce team is currently heavily focused on supporting the launch of Rhone’s line for women, and Contentsquare gives the team insights into the performance of landing pages which tease the line and share early access offers.
Contentsquare is also helping the team with its ongoing efforts to personalize their website experiences—a key factor in making its women’s line a success.
“When customers who land on our homepage click on the women’s products, we want them to land on a women’s product line or collection page next time they visit,” says Sarah.
To achieve this personalization, Rhone is currently performing extensive AB personalization tests with Dynamic Yield, a Contentsquare integration partner. Thanks to this integration, Sarah’s team is able to use Contentsquare to get deeper contextual insights into these tests.
That’s just one example of how Contentsquare is supporting the eCommerce team’s roadmap—and the continuing evolution of the Rhone brand.