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Global luxury house tests website personalization in China

Client profile

The client is a luxury fashion brand with headquarters in Europe and has already been present in the Chinese luxury market for multiple years. The client had been operating digital and physical assets in China, including its brand website, its stores on retailer websites (i.e. Tmall), and its physical stores.

Objective

The client’s brand website gets a lot of traffic but purchases were rarely made through their website. At the same time, the client had a lack of clarity on who was visiting their other channels like WeChat and Tmall, which is where a majority of purchases were made.

Daxue Consulting advised the client for two consecutive years on two topics:

  • How to optimize sales on the website
  • What kinds of consumers were visiting each channel and how to present value proposition to them

Research process & methodology

There were two phases to the research, each with a separate goal. The first phase was focused on data analysis to create a consumer persona design. The second phase consisted of using the consumer persona design to test hypothesis of consumer paths. The first two steps of the research aimed to create a digital consumer persona design to help the client understand the consumers on channels besides their website.

A digital consumer persona design has to be based on the actual product consumers. Therefore we collected data from many angles to piece together who the client’s consumers in China are. This included:

  • Analysis of website data to uncover the current situation of the client, including how consumers use their brand website, the pain points of visitors and how visitors move through the funnel.
  • Competitor benchmark analysis using third party software to uncover the current situation of competitors and an analysis of how competitors’ websites are used to increase sales both online and offline.
  • Consumer analysis and focus groups to understand the motivations of consumers for visiting luxury brand websites and the greater consumer journey.

On the base of these three angles of data analysis, we conducted a workshop with the client to co-design a digital consumer persona on which to test various hypotheses and proposed features.

Step one led us to hypotheses and design features to test the consumer journey. We broke the testing of new digital features into:

  • A/B testing of features like event triggers and navigation paths of the consumer journey.
  • UX testing with the client’s target consumers using scripted usability tests to observe the effectiveness of the proposed features, followed by interviews with test subjects to gather qualitative feedback.
  • These A/B and UX testing insights helped us assess the effectiveness of certain features and allow us to map possibly personalized consumer journeys based. Each round of testing was concluded with a workshop with the client to discuss what features to be tested in the next round.

Outcome

Based on our findings from testing, we presented the client fixes and functional suggestions for their digital consumer journey. Along with long-term strategy suggestions on:

  • How to position their website as the keystone of their O2O strategy in China
  • Revisions on the digital communication strategy to target a more qualified consumer base and redirect communication efforts to channels with a higher ROI
  • Tactics for the client to develop brand independence in China and keep consumers in a controlled funnel where they can have access to consumer data to make future strategy decisions.