Case Study: Optimized Website Experience Drives Holiday Revenues for Clarks

PROBLEM: Clarks, an omnichannel retailer of men's and women's shoes, sought to optimize the user experience on its website, including delivering improved response times and rendering, ultimately leading to an increase in conversion rate.

SOLUTION: In early November of last year, Clarks implemented a cloud-based engagement solution to optimize website performance.

RESULTS: In a year-over-comparison of the 2013 vs. 2012 holiday seasons (the Monday before Thanksgiving and running for two months after), Clarks saw its time on site increase 14-plus percent, pages per visit increase 6 percent, bounce rate decrease 12 percent and its conversion rate increase by double-digits.

When informed shortly before the all-important holiday season that its web optimization service was no longer being offered, Clarks founds itself in a position where it needed to quickly find a replacement to continue to maintain service levels and get it through its busiest time of the year. Already having an existing relationship with Yottaa, a mobile and web performance optimization company, Clarks opted to implement its Engagement Cloud solution.

In addition to being able to quickly implement Yottaa's cloud-based solution — the implementation took eight days, and was finished just in time for the start of the fourth quarter — Clarks was attracted to the personalization capabilities it offered. The retailer wanted to improve its engagement metrics (e.g., time spent on site, pages viewed per visit) and sales, and believed presenting personalized shopping experiences would help it accomplish that.

The Yottaa Engagement Cloud platform uses proprietary context intelligence technology to identify a user's location, browser, device, internet connectivity and in-page interaction to sequence relevant content delivery and display. When these elements are combined, the result is a more dynamic, personalized level of engagement that directly translates to increased conversions.

The platform allows companies to optimize consumer engagements across a variety of devices, ranging from smartphones to tablets and laptops.

"As we develop more content on the site, image and page rendering is going to continue to be more vital," says Rick Almeida, vice president, e-commerce, Clarks Americas. "With the visual representation of our brand and what we want to deliver to the consumer, it's going to be important to continue to optimize our site. Whether that's imagery, video or just the way to the page, we want to make sure that we optimize it the best we can, not just from a coding perspective but also through this service."

Scalable Solution for Future Growth
While having an optimization solution in place to capture the increased demand during the holidays was priority No. 1 for Clarks when it implemented Yottaa's Engagement Cloud, the retailer also wanted to make sure to implement a solution that could scale for future growth.

Like most successful companies, it was important to Clarks that it be able to maintain and improve its e-commerce site on a permanent basis without increasing the time and resources devoted to it.

"We want to continue to look at additional capabilities within the service that we haven't yet deployed," says Almeida. "That includes rendering from a sequencing perspective — e.g., what parts of the page render first, above or below the fold — and also looking to accelerate the sequencing and traffic targeting so that we can continue to see our metrics improve from an engagement perspective as well as from a conversion perspective."

Optimizing its mobile site is Clarks next big initiative. Due to the tight timeline it was working with last year prior to the holidays, the company focused its web optimization efforts on its desktop and tablet sites first. That focus has now shifted to mobile.

"We still have some opportunity ahead of us," Almeida says in regard to how Clarks can leverage Yottaa's Engagement Cloud to optimize mobile sales.