Digital Update: What we did in Q2 & Q3
A message from Louise Booth, Digital Director.
2021 has been a very exciting and busy year for the Digital team, and I am delighted to share some recent highlights.
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.
All the best,
Louise Booth and team
Our digital channels have never been so connected, and we continue to work hard to deliver best-in-class digital experiences for our consumers that are seamless across our digital ecosystem. Thanks to our new consumer-data-platform Exponea, we have more granular consumer data accessible to us that informs the planning and activations across all our channels. We are maturing and adding new skills to our digital toolbox, whilst constantly testing and learning new approaches.
Our 3 relaunched websites have all seen an increase in website traffic this year, with Winsor & Newton +162%, Liquitex +111% and Snazaroo +167 % at their highest point vs 2020. In addition the navigation/ drop down structure for the Snazaroo website recently improved – have a look here. We have just kicked off the relaunch project for the Lefranc Bourgeois’ website including adding eCommerce functionality and this will go live in 2022. Local markets can now have their own local landing pages giving them more opportunity to engage with consumers locally, supporting campaigns and activations
Driving high quality traffic to the Brands websites is important and a key driver is organic search (when you go on Google and search for a product or a technique or a Brand). We need to make sure our Brand websites come up in the top searches – and we do this through SEO (Search Engine Optimisations), a recently added expertise, Rebecca Smith to our Digital marketing mix with a huge amount of opportunity – already has Snazaroo seen +35 % improvement in new users from organic search, over the last 6 months and we are working closely with the Elephant team on improving SEO across the 3 Elephant websites, that have this year also had a make-over and improved navigation design.
We have refined our strategy in Consumer Lifecycle marketing and with the consumer at the heart of our strategic planning, we are building out targeted and automated consumer content programs – delivering the right content to the right consumer at the right time in their journey. So far this year 117k new high quality subscribers were acquired to the Winsor & Newton database, +288% vs 2020, bringing the total W&N database to 305k (vs KPI 250k). Driving this growth are value-based lead incentives such as content downloads, guides, educational video courses, cheat sheets relevant to specific audience segments. Lefranc Bourgeois recently hit their yearly KPI of 30K email subscribers, that’s up 33% vs last year, driven by kids campaigns, educational series and all digital channels working together to acquire new consumers.
Increasing email sends for Liquitex this year has driven better engagement and more traffic. Email open rates have grown +21% vs 2020 and is now reaching 26% (vs industry benchmarks ca 22%). This is due to more brand content and learnings from our A/B testing.
Consumers are more engaged then ever and interested in our products and brands. YTD we have received +22% more Consumer care questions vs previous year (14,859 in 2021 vs 12,173 in 2020). The Consumer care team expanded with one more consumer care agent, Daniel de la Fuente in the spring, and now 92% of tickets are being resolved within 24 hours (in 1st half to 2021 this was 82%). Delivering a strong consumer experience through consumer care is very important for our Brands.
Our social media marketing has expanded to include Pinterest and Youtube, as well as more focus on paid digital advertising with a large number of ads running on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube and Google. For all campaigns across our brands, we track and monitor the cost per action and refine and optimse the ads daily vs the objectives and KPI. The Winsor & Newton Watercolour campaign earlier this year achieved 1.9m video views and had 6m+ impressions driving over 130k clicks to the WN website
Moving on from the consumer side of digital marketing, the B2B Portal Trade.Colart is now live in the UK, Italy and France – allowing small retailers to buy products from us in a much more efficient way. We have a roadmap of more sites to be launched during 2022, including the Dutch-Belgium and Spanish site coming soon
PIM – our powerful Product information management tool with all the information of our products in one place, continues to grow and now has over 10k SKUs and over 2M data points. We are working on making it more easily accessible for the markets and hope to launch this functionality early 2022.
Well done Digital!
Exceptional results from all involved.