The Challenge
With a small team managing the site in several countries, the challenge for the brand was to be able to adjust its offer according to visitors’ behavior as well as demographic information, such as language, nationality, and gender.
Volcom is a Californian brand, founded in 1991, that designs clothes and accessories for board sports, surfing, skate boarding and snowboarding. They sell their products on a multilingual website in 20 different European countries, primarily focusing on France, Germany, Spain, UK, and Italy. Volcom has aggressive growth targets on all levers, both e-commerce and digital marketing. Volcom started their e-commerce store in 2014. Before integrating Nosto, they used the native recommendations of their CMS of the time, but they were very manual and not flexible at all.
With a small team managing the site in several countries, the challenge for the brand was to be able to adjust its offer according to visitors’ behavior as well as demographic information, such as language, nationality, and gender.
Nosto’s Technical Solution Manager helped Volcom’s technical teams to integrate the API on Shopify and enabled them to start using the platform quickly. Once integrated, the team has had regular meetings with their dedicated Customer Success Manager, who gave them strategic advice on how to use the full potential of the Nosto platform.
Volcom first started with Nosto by using product recommendations and began using other products as they built out their personalization and merchandising strategy more. Today, Volcom uses several products from Nosto’s Commerce Experience platform:
Volcom uses product recommendations to display relevant products based on both the individual’s demographic and their onsite behavior.
Volcom uses dynamic product bundles to create “Shop The Look” recommendations, which recommend the complimentary items most frequently purchased with the product currently being viewed. One of the most effective parts of these recommendations is that they’re filtered to only show products that are currently in stock.
Volcom uses personalized content to address each shopper differently. The brand especially wanted to deliver hyper-personalized experiences for women who came to their site. To better address women shoppers, the Volcom home page displays a personalized banner that highlights women’s products to visitors who have previously shown an interest in women’s apparel.
Volcom uses pop-ups triggered by the lifecycle stage of a shopper. For example, new visitors receive a promotional offer that encourages them to join the “Volcom Family” in exchange for their email as soon as they land on the homepage.
Today, Nosto drives 20% of Volcom’s online sales. For visitors who interacted with Nosto products, they saw a 10% increase in average order value. Volcom’s conversion rate increased 3.5x and the brand’s average visit value increased 3.8x. In the last half of 2019, Nosto drove €200,000 in sales for Volcom, with an incremental €52,000, and, as Mathieu said, implementing Nosto paid for itself in just five days.
This improvement in shoppers’ experiences helped Volcom drive customer loyalty and increase customer retention, leading to: