There are anniversary milestones and then there is King Arthur Flour. America’s oldest flour company and premier baking resource, King Arthur Flour is celebrating its 225th anniversary this year, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t keeping up with the times. Its ecommerce business accounts for about 20% of its revenue and the company has taken steps to boost its online customer engagement levels.
King Arthur Flour has partnered with Yottaa, a leading cloud platform for optimizing web and mobile applications, to optimize, accelerate, and secure the company’s ecommerce site. King Arthur Flour is available in supermarkets nationwide. What’s more, in excess of 1,000 tested and trusted baking tools and ingredients are available through King Arthur Flour’s Baker’s Catalogue, at The Baker’s Store in Norwich, Vermont, and online.
One of the challenges the company has faced in recent years is balancing ecommerce and IT resources across its various channels, including its popular recipe site. As a result, King Arthur Flour’s web team sought to augment online performance and increase conversion rates, especially for tablets and mobile devices.
Mike Hoefer, Director of Web Development, King Arthur Flour told Loyalty360 that using Yottaa has helped King Arthur Flour improve its customer engagement.
“We’ve already seen improvements in the loading speed and ecommerce conversion rates,” Hoefer explained. “Also, our engineering team uses the available reports and data from Yottaa to quickly correct issues and bugs that impact the customer’s experience.”
Yottaa’s InstantONTM technology caches 100% of the King Arthur Flour site by intelligently de-personalizing site pages and storing them in Yottaa’s AdaptiveCDNTM edge-caches. For every user request, InstantON acquires the visitor’s personal information for the server, updates their edge-caches, and sends the personalized content to the visitor’s browser.
Since going live on the Yottaa platform, King Arthur Flour has experienced dramatic improvements in web performance: Start Render Time: 36% improvement; and Fully Loaded Time: 20% improvement.
“Providing unique and positive encounters for our customers has always been and will remain one of the top concerns of King Arthur Flour,” Hoefer added. “It is part of who we are as a B-Corp and a 100% employee-owned company. We only succeed when our customers succeed. Our vertical integration and passionate customers allow us do to provide a customer experience that is unique for a CPG company and catalog retailer. 
Hoefer explained that membership in the company’s Bakers Rewards Plus loyalty program is strong and growing.
“It’s one measure we use to define customer loyalty,” Hoefer said. “We have large communities across several social networks (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram) and we are always looking for ways to leverage our online participation to support sales of our products in the grocery store where customer loyalty is particularly important. We will measure the success of our engagement with Yottaa across several metrics. Primarily, via year-over-year ecommerce conversion rate improvements, but also via the “softer” ROI factors such as email signups, reduced bounce rate, and recipes viewed, saved, and printed.”