Officials at Canadian fashion retailer Boathouse didn’t know what to expect when it partnered with content marketing technology specialist Zmags. They hoped for a bump in customer engagement, and got that, and then some.
Zmags deployed its Creator platform with Boathouse and the results were amazing.
““Typically, we get 30-45 seconds dwell time on normal pages, but this has increased to upwards of five minutes with Creator—so our customer engagement metrics are fantastic,” said Marc Schwartz, digital and marketing strategy leader for Boathouse. “When people saw the site, they started to ask, ‘This is Boathouse?’ on social media; that’s a great reaction from a brand perspective.”
Schwartz explained that Zmags Creator was primarily deployed to rapidly create and launch online merchandising experiences, including look books, around specific clothing lines.
Here are the results: Boathouse has seen dwell times increase by 500% with thousands more site visits recorded in just the first few weeks of deployment, and its conversion rate increased by a staggering 85% for Zmags Creator campaigns.
For any retailer, the challenge is making merchandising as interactive as possible. New product lines, collections, and seasonal changes translate to new campaigns that need to be created against quick-turn cycles to keep content fresh and customers returning.
And for Boathouse, this meant a level of complexity in planning ahead, producing creative assets, coding, bug fixing, and publishing that was restrictive. Since all of Boathouse’s development work was completed by an external agency, any site updates were time-consuming and costly—usually into the thousands of dollars range.
As a result, Boathouse wanted a faster and more efficient way for its small team of six people to make changes to its website and to make the site rich and engaging.
With the help of Zmags Creator, that is possible now because it uses simple drag-and-drop tools, widgets, and asset libraries to enable the user to quickly build and deploy anything from content sliders to look books and landing pages or to easily animate images and include video.
“I didn’t have to spend a lot of time or do any hand holding,” added Schwartz. “I asked the designer for specific elements and didn’t need the designer to create flat files. I just said, ‘give me all the files, and I can compile it myself on-scene’ — it was that simple.”
Brian Rigney, CEO at Zmags, said: “Today, in-house marketing teams are expected to have an array of skills to bring product-related content to the attention of consumers. Online, this means that the process of creating consumer-focused experiences—that immerse them in beautiful images or video — is both lengthy and costly when marketers use a traditional process. With Zmags Creator, Boathouse has been able to simplify that process, build engagement and realize a quick return on investment.”