The company
From humble beginnings to a global powerhouse, the Cotton On Group has come a long way. Founded in 1991 in Geelong, Australia, with just a rack of denim jackets and shirts, the company quickly blossomed into a major retail player.
Today, it operates in over 17 countries, boasts 5 primary brands (Cotton On, Supré, Factorie, Typo, and Cotton On Body) and offers a diverse product portfolio, spanning youth streetwear, quirky stationery, homewares, intimates, and activewear.
Demonstrating a strong commitment to customer experience (CX), Cotton On Group has embraced a comprehensive digital enablement strategy. This strategy focuses on breaking down internal silos, optimizing their ecommerce platform, and leveraging Contentsquare to accelerate their customer-centric initiatives.
The challenges
Cotton On Group’s ecommerce operations were historically segmented into acquisition, brand, and core ecommerce functions.
This fragmentation led to numerous issues, including misalignment in key performance measures (KPIs) and siloed functions primarily focusing on developing new website features.
Cotton On Group lacked insight into the holistic journey.
The analytics tools teams used (like Google Analytics) lacked real-time visualization capabilities, comprehensive integration across functions, and auto-capture of data.
Faced with these challenges, Matt Spowart, Head of Digital Enablement & Brand Optimization at Cotton On Group turned to Contentsquare as an efficient and easy-to-use platform.
The solution
When the company restructured its operations, it emphasized a brand-led approach. This shift aimed to align all functions toward common goals focused on enhancing the customer experience.
As part of this initiative, the company initially trialed Contentsquare to customers on its U.S. site (a key growth market).
It wasn’t long before real-time insights and visual data from Contentsquare provided teams with actionable intelligence, fostering a culture of rapid experimentation and iteration.
Throughout, the digital enablement team (comprising UX design, product management, marketing technology (MarTech), platform optimization and operations support) collaborated closely with brand teams to ensure seamless customer engagement across all touchpoints.
Here are the main ways in which the Cotton On Group team was able to meet ts objectives.
1. Improving site navigation—and conversion rates
The business grappled with a double-edged sword: high website bounce rates and misaligned customer navigation paths. This meant customers were leaving the site quickly and browsing without buying.
Contentsquare’s platform (with its array of easy-to-use visualization tools) was instrumental in helping the Digital Enablement team discover what was going on—and to address the underlying causes.
The team used a number of Contentsquare capabilities to dive deep into user behavior, including Heatmaps to see where customers were clicking, Session Replay to understand customers from their point of view, and Journey Analysis to understand how customers were making their way through the site, from browsing to the point of purchase.
By analyzing these visual journeys, the team could pinpoint exact areas on the website where customers were getting frustrated and abandoning their shopping experience.
With a clear understanding of customer drop-off points, the company streamlined website navigation, enhanced product discoverability, guided users towards checkout, and optimized search with relevant keywords and filters.
Contentsquare's Journey Analysis capability
Ecommerce leaders within the Cotton On Group are now using Contentsquare. As a result, they're able to see where customers are landing on the website and where they're going to, which helps them to quickly conclude where they're bouncing.
2. Benchmarking performance against competitors and improving market knowledge
In the past, Cotton On Group struggled to keep up with the ever-evolving retail landscape. The group lacked the crucial insights needed to understand industry trends and how competitors were performing. This created a blind spot, hindering the brand’s ability to make informed decisions and stay ahead.
But with access to real-time competitive intelligence through Contentsquare’s Benchmarks capability, Cotton On Group could finally benchmark its performance against its peers, tracking metrics like conversion rates, product popularity, and customer behavior on competitor websites through a live dashboard.
By analyzing this data, the digital enablement team gained a deeper understanding of market dynamics. They could see what strategies were working well for Cotton On Group’s competitors and identify areas where they needed to improve.
![[Visual] Cotton on Group insights](png/screenshot_2024-11-07_at_16.18.24a4ce.png)
Benchmarks showed the team areas for opportunity and improvement
This newfound knowledge empowered Matt’s team to make data-driven decisions, adjusting marketing campaigns, product offerings, and website features to stay competitive in the market. This not only helped them attract new customers but also retain existing ones by providing a shopping experience to rival the best in the industry.
3. Optimizing product categories to drive revenue
Certain product categories were consistently underperforming, dragging down overall sales. Identifying the root cause and fixing it was crucial—Contentsquare provided the missing piece.
The group’s merchandising team leveraged Contentsquare’s advanced analytics to dissect category performance, analyzing factors like click-through rates on specific products, how long customers stayed on category pages, and how customers navigated within each section.
By identifying the most popular products within each category, the team could understand customer preferences and tailor the product mix accordingly. In addition, Contentsquare revealed areas where the category layout was hindering customer exploration.
These insights empowered the merchandising team to embark on a strategic remerchandising exercise. This involved giving prominent placement to popular products within the category to encourage browsing and potential purchases.
![[Visual] Cotton On Group - heatmap](png/frame_1__1_a4ce.png)
Heatmap analysis of Cotton On Group's product categories
The team also optimized the category layout for better flow and user experience, using data to help personalize promotions and highlight products that might appeal to customers who'd shown interest in the category.
4. Personalizing customer acquisition
Ineffective acquisition strategies were leading to customers arriving on the group’s site who weren't the right fit and churned quickly. Here, Contentsquare's dashboards provided the solution.
By analyzing data on each acquisition channel's performance, Matt’s team could see which channels were attracting customers who actually converted and stuck around. This allowed them to double down on marketing efforts in channels that brought in customers who were most likely to make repeat purchases.
They refined or abandoned acquisition strategies that weren't attracting valuable customers, and tailored marketing messages and promotions to specific customer segments based on their acquisition channel.
As a result, the group is now able to attract customers with a higher propensity to stay loyal, leading to improved retention and satisfaction rates.
Our merchandising team uses Contentsquare to look at the customer’s experience on the site and test, learn, and play around with what could be the optimal model to improve conversion and acquisition.
5. Improving the impact of visual content
The Cotton On Group had previously relied on intuition when designing their homepage, unsure of what content truly resonated with customers. Contentsquare has enabled the brand to understand and focus on what truly captures customer attention—and optimize its homepage for engagement and conversion.
One of the first eye-opening revelations Contentsquare unlocked for Matt’s team was that site visitors weren't interacting with content placed below the fold. This prompted them to elevate visually appealing and high-performing content to the top of the fold so that it grabbed attention immediately.
Matt’s team has also used Contentsquare to test different versions of calls to action (CTAs), product placements, and imagery to see what drives the most clicks and engagement—and to continuously refine the group’s homepage content strategy to maximize conversions.
The results
Cotton On Group's journey illustrates the transformative power of a well-structured digital enablement strategy and the impact of real-time insights on customer experience.
By breaking down silos, leveraging powerful analytics tools like Contentsquare, and fostering a culture of rapid experimentation, the group has significantly enhanced its ecommerce operations.
All in all, this highlights the importance of aligning organizational structures with customer-centric goals and the value of actionable data in driving continuous improvement and global growth.
