Go behind the scenes of Wittner's replatforming strategy in this extract from our eCommerce report. Discover how General Pants, Superdry and Alquemie Group are adapting their digital operations by downloading the free report here.
Whether it was sheer luck or genius timing, Wittner had just replatformed its website a week before Australia entered its first lockdown in March 2020.
The 12-month project saw the business shift from its old platform – that has been in use for as long as anyone internally can remember – to a newer one, allowing it to leverage its online sales during the lockdowns in a way that it couldn’t have before.
The decision to switch the platform was based on a desire to ensure customers were receiving the absolute best customer experience, and to increase conversion.
The strategy worked, with Wittner witnessing a 50% uplift in conversion since replatforming.
Wittner eCommerce and digital manager Iona Shearer says that two key strategies helped the business achieve this outcome.
“We've always had really good traffic really high sessions.
“Obviously, we're a known brand, but we just wanted to stabilise that conversion and grow it, and the way we did that was through our merchandising and our on-site search strategies,” she says.
To do this, the footwear retailer onboarded a new search platform which allowed it to leverage what people were searching for to create tailored campaigns around that.
The strategy works to ensure that if you’re searching on the site, you have a higher likelihood of conversion.
And it’s working.
Those who shop Wittner using search are 2.5 times more likely to convert than someone who doesn’t use search.
“It's been really great for solidifying and growing that conversion number,” Shearer says.
“We've also used sort of greater audience segmentation in our email communication and on site to target those warm audiences with relevant content."
The second piece of the puzzle is the merchandising strategy which has shifted from a ‘shop-window’ like method, to using data points to surface relevant content to the top.
“For example, in a sale category, I might define a global rule that says, ‘I want items that have great stock breadth at the top but also that have been bestsellers in the last X amount of time,” Shearer explains.
She adds that this will become even more personalised with artificial intelligence (AI) in the long-term, tailoring the products to the person’s actual behaviour on the site.
The third piece of the conversion pie is Wittner’s focus on affiliates.
“We have a really strong affiliate channel and we use those partnerships to really leverage and pick up sales from a different demographic – a different user – and bring in new people who want to discover the brand and shop with us in a slightly different way,” Shearer explains.
That strategy is also delivering results for the brand, with the affiliate marketing channel growing by 50%.
Utilising the on-site search, merchandising, email segmentation and affiliate program, Wittner has seen its online sales grow by 20% year to date versus the last financial year.
However, the replatforming project didn’t come without its challenges.
Aside from the technical integration, the business had to ensure its team was trained up on the new features, Shearer says.
“Ensuring the team is enabled to deliver upon the customer experience we set out to achieve and that any new features sets are communicated to the entire business, from our head office teams to our team members in-store, was a challenge we faced,” she says.
But the business was able to overcome this and work to deliver results on its new digital platform.
Another key component to Wittner’s success in the eCommerce channel is its on-site marketing.
Shearer explains that for certain users, the business is able to redirect them to a category that may be more relevant to them.
"We might see that you've come on site, and you don't look like you're really having much luck finding what you're looking for,” she says.
“But we see that where you are, it's 30 degrees and it's hot. So, we might say, ‘hey, we can see that where you are it's pretty warm. Maybe you need to be looking at the sandals category'.
“It's about redirecting and providing that additional information where it's relevant for someone who might not be finding what they're looking for, or just not be certain of their purchase,” Shearer says.
However, the lift in online sales has not been all smooth sailing. As is well known, the delivery of goods was a difficult challenge to overcome when logistics channels were backlogged and overloaded with increased eCommerce sales - Australia Post reported that it delivered 52 million parcels through the December peak period in 2021.
“The challenge was we had this influx of sales and limited staff able to actually process because of all the stipulations on how many people were allowed to work per square metre,” Shearer explains.
“What we found with that was alongside working throug everything as quickly as we could, transparency and good communications with our customer was key.
“We just made sure that on-site messaging was available, that communication to customers who had purchased was going ahead and ensured that customers knew that there might be a delay prior to purchasing, so that she wasn't getting anything unexpected,” she says.
Now that the delivery kink has somewhat smoothed out, Wittner has turned its attention to the future.
In the short term, the business will focus on its continuing goal to increase conversion and keep it growing at a consistent rate.
Shearer says that the business wants to grow its sessions too but wants those to be meaningful for the customer.
“We get a lot of traffic and it's been pretty stable,” she says.
“But now is a really great opportunity to bring more people to the site, we want new eyeballs on the site as well as our existing ones.
“So, we’re building that up, but also ensuring the users that come to site are having a relevant, valuable experience.
“We want valid, valuable sessions that have a higher likelihood of conversion because they're seeing what they want or need to see when they're coming to the website,” Shearer says.
This goal is backed by the email segmentation, search, merchandising and SEO strategies that are helping to build the sessions for the business.
Thanks to the replatforming, customers now receive a mix of ‘business as usual’ emails alongside personalised emails based on their loyalty tier, customer profile, previous purchases, and interests at an optimised time that best suits them.
In the long term, Shearer says Wittner wants to utilise AI to enhance its retargeting, product recommendations and customer service.
“We're always looking for ways to optimise and improve our customer experience and I think AI is a place that's going to help us pick that up,” she says.
“It’s about streamlining processes and making the website as smart as possible.
“We currently have in-depth merchandising strategies that we use a lot of data for, but we want to use AI so that we can almost have a hands-off approach – rather than us going in pulling the data and making those decisions.
“So that's definitely a next step for us,” she says.