Zmags, the shoppable content company, announced stellar results for Godiva, the maker of fine Belgian chocolates, following deployment of the Zmags Creator digital publishing platform for Godiva’s Valentine’s Day 2016 campaign.
Retailers are increasingly faced with competitive and consumer pressure to publish compelling digital experiences — and to do it faster. Zmags Creator helped Godiva quickly address these challenges by increasing creative output 380% and improving productivity 50%. These efficiencies led to an immediate 300% lift in conversions from content over the prior year.
“Zmags Creator has had a huge impact on our ability to quickly publish engaging digital experiences,” shares Brita Turner, director of ecommerce at Godiva. Brita will be discussing how Godiva has transformed its digital publishing performance at the Zmags booth at Demandware XChange ‘16 in Hollywood, Fla., on Tuesday, April 5, 2016.
The Godiva Challenge
Godiva’s ecommerce team aspired to deliver conversational and lifestyle-driven digital experiences that engage their customers as a part of the Godiva brand experience. However, with a small team, Godiva was limited in its ability to create and launch experiential content with robust digital functionality.
Compounding Godiva’s aspirations was a growing customer demand to learn more about Godiva’s heritage, product quality and production processes as well as interactive content, including recipes and entertaining tips. Godiva struggled to launch this broad scope of digital content on a regular basis. They needed a scalable solution to generate this rich content for an elevated site experience.
As content-driven marketing has gained strategic importance at Godiva, the ecommerce team knew their current model simply would not scale. They needed to get more content up faster and make it easy for any member of their team — and even others at the company — to design and publish compelling experiences without any need to code.
The Zmags Solution
Upon seeing Zmags Creator in action, the Godiva team realized that it could solve many of their immediate needs. Its drag-and-drop functionality reduces the amount of coding needed. Zmags Creator has a Demandware cartridge, meaning it integrates with their Demandware ecommerce platform for easy “shop the look” functionality, and it simplifies publishing rich content pages. The tool is easy for the marketing and non-technical teams, allowing for updates at any time of the day.
“Creator is a user-friendly tool that has given our small ecommerce team the freedom to provide our customers dynamic digital experiences,” explained Christine O’Brien, manager of Web & Digital at Godiva. “Previously, we were limited by both team size and creative templates. Now, we are able to create elegant and original content without worrying about how long and complicated the coding process will be.”
Having just hand-coded a time-consuming new gift guide for Christmas 2015, the team was eager to compare that process with their inaugural Zmags Creator campaign, Valentine’s Day 2016 — one of Godiva’s biggest campaigns of the year. Celebrity spokesperson Eva Longoria anchored the campaign, and Godiva used Zmags Creator to build an online lookbook showcasing Eva’s top six gift picks. As compared to historical online celebrity appearances, this campaign generated a 300 percent conversion rate lift year over year.
The Godiva Results
In the first few months of using Zmags Creator, Godiva has already realized a 380% increase in productivity and creative output — and they expect that number will only increase as more colleagues are brought onto the team and participate in the Zmags platform.
O’Brien notes that Creator enables her to be at least 50% more productive. And beyond just building more experiences, she sees the platform as helping the team deliver better experiences. Adding rich elements like videos, animations and social sharing is as simple as drag-and-drop, and they are not chained to rigid templates anymore.
Moving to Zmags Creator has also fundamentally changed how the team works. They are now able to spend more time thinking about their content strategy. They have more bandwidth to dig into metrics to find out what is working and what is not, and they can reflect site changes on demand. After only a few months of use, Godiva is already planning how to utilize more of the capabilities of Zmags Creator to drive even better customer experiences and higher ROI.
“Creator has enabled our small team to make a big impact. We’re now delivering more elevated experiences for our customers online, while at the same time dramatically reducing the effort need to create those experiences,” said O’Brien.