Contentsquare, the global leader in digital experience analytics, and Hobbycraft, the UK’s leading arts and crafts retailer, have worked together to improve the eCommerce functions of its website, following pandemic-driven consumer interest in new hobbies. According to Pitney Bowes data, 94% of consumers took up a new hobby to pass the time during the height of the 2020 global pandemic, including art, crochet, haberdashery, papercraft, wedding and party, baking, jewellery making and more, but many have reportedly struggled to keep up with newfound hobbies post-pandemic. Hobbycraft saw this as an opportunity to activate its website to cater to customers with interest in advancing in existing hobbies or to inspire a love of a new crafting discipline. The company used Contentsquare digital experience insights to achieve this as it replatformed its eCommerce site, nurturing people’s interests by delivering better experiences that serve customers the information and inspiration they seek. As a result, Hobbycraft’s website-driven revenue has grown 20% year-on-year.
By surfacing visitor trends, Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform identified which eCommerce site zones were most effective or could use some attention. Contentsquare’s replatform team worked with Hobbycraft digital marketers to strategize and prioritize components of Hobbycraft’s eCommerce site, monitoring for and sharing instant insights on performance, as well as noteworthy changes and trends in customer behavior. These insights informed many of Hobbycraft’s decisions around user interface, product content, content or promotion placement, customer call-to-action, and others.
“Prior to adopting Contentsquare, we had a digital solution for our website that worked fine, but we realized that it may have been keeping us from finding more opportunities to connect with crafters around the world, so they can use our expertise to nurture hobbies that had been a saving grace during the pandemic,” said Jennifer North, Head of Digital at Hobbycraft. “We have more than 23,000 products on our website, and sifting through them can be overwhelming, so being able to use the data insights from Contentsquare to deliver information and products to customers that cater to individual interests has been a game changer. We needed a more powerful, flexible and feature-rich platform in a bid to meet evolving customer expectations around experience. Our customers now know we understand them and their hobbies better, and are able to serve them the experiences that they want and deserve.”
Replatforming, sometimes described as similar to the process of designing and building an “amazing new house” led to two key results for the brand: building great eCommerce journeys for Hobbycraft customers, on both mobile and desktop, and designing a new look and feel to reflect Hobbycraft’s status as a creative destination for arts and crafts. The Hobbycraft team is now able to view web elements that looked great in design but didn’t work as expected once they went live—including a button placement that was damaging session sign-ins, an over-busy page that was reducing guest checkouts and some copy around gift cards that was causing customers to abandon the payment page. The ability to manage performance and course-correct in real time helped Hobbycraft’s website generate more than £300.000 over the course of six months.
“When your conversion is being challenged by the changes of a replatform and other external factors, you have to be really confident that the tasks and changes you’re giving your dev team are the right things to focus on. Contentsquare gives us that confidence,” continued North.
Contentsquare’s ability to monitor website visitor activity and serve up business-critical insights –not just clicks, but also mouse hovers, scrolling, search behaviours, etc. — continues to be instrumental in improving customer journeys in ways that aren’t invasive to personal customer data.
“A website that doesn’t delight visitors is a huge missed opportunity, especially when it serves as a main revenue channel,” said John O’Melia, Chief Customer Officer at Contentsquare. “Hobbycraft understood the potential of its website and leaned into the story that behavioural data told, continually making decisions that put customers at the centre of everything.”
Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform provides a range of features (including Zone-Based Heatmaps, Customer Journey Analysis and Session Replays) that will help brands understand how customers are using their replatformed site, with powerful AI dedicated to bringing the most valuable insights to immediate attention. Most recently, the company released an enhanced version of its Speed Analysis capability, part of the Find & Fix application, to include real-user monitoring.
