Download PDFOn 27th February 2019 the new Liquitex Brand website went live! This is a milestone in Colart’s Digital transformation journey and a key building block in Liquitex’ s strategy to reach their vision to be the first choice in acrylic.
The main objectives of this new site are to deliver a great brand experience and to drive brand preference. Research shows that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great consumer experience and 65% of buyers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising. “Having a website with rich, relevant content that is easy to use and fully managed in-house is a fundamental part of our Digital marketing strategy” says Louise Booth, Digital Director.
The Liquitex website was created with 3 key user journeys in mind:
- Product Information
“I want clear, scientific, technical, user-friendly information on the products I need and more” - How to’s (Tips & Techniques)
“I want to get underneath the skin of the products and all the ways I can use them, I want engaging and informative content” - Purchase Pathway
“I want to find out how and where I can buy them”
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Jen Simon, Global Communications Manager for Liquitex, says “A primary function of the site is to educate consumers. This includes our partners in retail, who we believe will use the site to further develop their knowledge about the brand. As key influencers, store staff will be encouraged to use Liquitex.com as a resource for themselves and the community of artists they serve.”
This launch marks a number of firsts for both Liquitex and Colart. It is our first e-commerce website fully created and built in-house on the WordPress platform, and it’s also our first site fully supported by the new Product Information Management (PIM) platform (more on this below). It is a fully responsive, product focused site, tested on artists bringing to life the brand values and design in an integrated way. There is comprehensive information about all our products, a wide selection of videos and written techniques guides, plus a huge library of FAQs (frequently asked questions) to help artists in their practise and be a great resource for our retailers when they guide consumers. The E-Commerce capabilities are currently only available for the US market, with the plan to add more markets in the future.
Kim Stylides, Global Marketing Director for Liquitex, says “Liquitex.com will be the destination for everything acrylic! From product information, to tips and techniques, the new Liquitex.com further positions us as the brand of choice amongst acrylic paint users, both existing and new. The newly relaunched site provides visitors an enhanced user experience via improved functionality and engaging content, while serving as a visual representation of our commitment to building an authentic sense of community.”
THE LOOK AND FEEL
Simplicity and functionality – the site feels modern, colourful and engaging. We’ve worked closely with the same design agency who we worked with on for the Liquitex new packaging and new instore display units and materials, so the site feels completely aligned with the brand values. The user experience is hugely improved taking into account over 50% of users access the site on their mobile.
WHAT WAS THE JOURNEY?
Over the last 12 months or so, the developers in the Digital Team have built new infrastructure that allows us to build e-commerce websites in-house using data from the new PIM, the Bank and M3. A major part of building a site is uploading and maintaining a huge amount of data – and this interconnected trio of behind-the-scenes systems completely automates that process.
From a design perspective a dedicated UX (User experience) designer developed designs and user journeys and used feedback from real artists, with the aim to turn the Liquitex site into a user-friendly site that artists or retailers can use as a reference point for all things acrylic. The site is built on a customised WordPress platform using specially designed drag-n-drop modules which can be used and adapted for each new site we roll out in the future. These modules make it easy for our in-house content editors to create the pages with words, pictures and videos that our artists want to see. A huge amount of copy has been written and edited for the hundreds of pages that make up the site, and all the beautiful brand assets and videos have been added in close collaboration with the Brand team.
WHY BRING IT IN-HOUSE?
It’s more cost effective – building and day to day maintenance can be done by the Digital team, rather than briefing an external agency. It saves time – working in an agile way we can turn projects around quicker. It’s more self-sufficient and automatic – we’re less dependent on external suppliers to change prices, etc. It’s more sustainable – as we build up internal capabilities. Ultimately it delivers a better end result for our consumers – we can now build using faster running programming languages and on servers that are kept completely up to date that give us huge performance gains.
WHAT IS THE PIM?
This is our Product Information Management system which will bring together all of our core product data across the business for a brand and feeds into the website. “Instead of a series of excel masterfiles saved on local PCs, we bring all the data together as one source of truth – vital in a business of our size” explains Nicky Shaw, Digital Strategist and responsible for the PIM.
Liquitex went onto the PIM first, Snazaroo, W&N and Charbonnel are currently being worked on. The PIM contains marketing and technical attributes and descriptions, regulatory data, pricing, M3 product data, and pulls imagery from the Bank. Data is cleansed and mapped into a model and then exported into the backend of WordPress.
Sam Webster Principal developer adds “as the WordPress templates, PIM and all these processes were new, there was a lot of trial and error to get the format looking right.”
Some fun data facts for Liquitex PIM:
- 1,142 Liquitex SKUS
- 59,743 data points to be entered, cleaned and checked
- 2,660 product images uploaded, checked, cropped and reordered in the Bank
WHAT’S NEXT?
Kevin Lee, Global Ecommerce Director, says “The improved user experience and enhanced checkout process has resulted in a 57% increase in conversion rate in the first two weeks.”
Great feedback is coming in from around the world which is fantastic. The Digital team and the Brand team continue to work on optimizing the site, including the implementation of Nosto, an AI powered personalisation engine that will deliver 1:1 personalised content to consumers on the website, email and social real time and adding new content and launching new products.
In addition, the next big Website project is just about to kick off – Winsor & Newton. More to come….
CONGRATULATIONS!
Thank you and congratulations to the team that has been working hard on this launch, including Toby Russell, Arthur Saunders, James Rooney, Sam Webster, Georgia Sugarman, Sarah Christopher, Nicky Shaw, Rachael Reynolds, David Carter, Bhoomil Shah and Parth Patel. Also thanks to the cross-functional support from the US – the Liquitex Brand team and Ecommerce team- as well as the wider Technology teams.