Download PDFThe first 6 months of 2020 have been busy for the Digital team and I am excited to share some of the key highlights and deliverables.
• We reached a total of more than 11m consumers on our Brands social media channels and have had over 1.4mwebsite visits
• Our email open rate increased on average from 21% to 29% and more than 300k interactions took place on our social media channels (this means a click, a like, a share or a comment)
• Combined, our brands Instagram channels grew with an additional 50k new fans and the net growth of our email database increased by 14k new consumers signing up to receive regular communications
• We had 12% more returning visits to the brands websites compared to last year and organic traffic is growing as well (which means high-quality traffic)
What has been driving these encouraging results?
Of course, the pandemic and lockdown have had an effect as we know that consumers around the world have been more engaged with digital channels. During April all our brands responded to the challenging global situation through strong digital activations. Winsor & Newton released 20 complimentary Masterclass videos and this was promoted on email and social channels; Liquitex has been releasing tips and techniques and hosting live events on their Instagram channel; Snazaroo promoted the Make & Create page on the website, with guides for indoor activities with children and Lefranc Bourgeois communicated the #StayCreative hashtag, with tutorials and creative challenges. Responses from consumers have been very positive across the board which resulted in soared engagement rates and email open rates.
Additionally, our brands activated several big campaigns across digital channels. Winsor & Newton’s watercolour and oil campaign both drove strong acquisition and engagement amongst leisure artists by providing educational content and competitions. The oil campaign reached over 3.5M consumers and the watercolour activation recruited 12k new Instagram fans.
Liquitex’s sticker challenge, launched to celebrate their 65th anniversary, reached 3m consumers and drove over 25k website visits with many artists submitting their designs in the competition. Snazaroo’s campaign for World Book Day reached 117k on social channels and saw an increase in website traffic. Lefranc Bourgeois focused on celebrating their 300 year anniversary with the first chapter of the campaign launched, reaching over 2.6m consumers and with the website now also available in English for the first time.
Alongside all the digital communications taking place for the brands, the Digital Team have been working on 5 key strategic projects during the first half of 2020.
1. Improving our rankings in Google Search results (called SEO) is one of them, and traffic to our websites have increased by 38% vs last year as well as a reduced bounce rate (meaning a consumer lands on our site but leaves straight away). This is due to comprehensive improvements when tagging content and assets on our websites, resulting in a more visible presence and high-quality traffic in searches. This is just the beginning of our efforts in this area, and will continue to be a key focus for us in 2020 and 2021.
2. Building long lasting profitable relationships with our consumers through “the right content, at the right time to the right consumer on the right channel” is the purpose of eCRM (Consumer Relationship Management) and this is our second key initiative where consumers receive personalised and relevant content depending on where they are in their purchase lifecycle. A comprehensive plan and roadmap have been created and initial results are really encouraging.
3. Building out the PIM (Product information management system) is a business-critical tool holding detailed data and information about all Colart’s products and SKUS. With over 1M data points covering WN, LQX, and SNZ and with LB soon to come, the PIM powers our eCommerce websites and will also power the B2B Portal (soon to launch in 2H of this year).
4. Understanding our consumers’ behaviour through comprehensive analytics and reporting is key to informing our future digital communications plans and to test and learn new initiatives and measure ROI. We now report all our activities in a more consistent way, with Monthly Brand Channel trackers and detailed campaign reports. We continue to focus on this important area with an exciting project to be launched in early 2021.
5. One of the highlights in June was of course the relaunch of the Winsor & Newton website, with improved consumer experience, mobile-friendly functionality and a beautiful design. This was a significant cross-functional project and a milestone in the digital transformation of Colart. Next to come is to switch on the eCommerce functionality and to continue to optimise the website even further.
In addition, our Global Consumer care team have received 7649 questions from consumers during the first 6 months, 80% of those have been resolved within 24 hours. This spring we introduced automations that allowed us to answer requests like sampling/sponsorship opportunities much faster, giving us time to focus on more complicated, technical queries or quality complaints. The team has also started to create an archive of technical knowledge across all the brands and this important project will continue throughout 2020 and into 2021.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Digital team for any questions or comments. We love to share what’s going on in the Digital world. The second half of 2020 is bound to be very exciting!
All the best,
Louise Booth and everyone in the Digital team