T.O by Lipton, Unilever’s Keurig-like tea brewer in France, was struggling to turn analytics from its ecommerce platform into actionable insights.
“With [tools like] Google Analytics, I could know what consumers were doing, but I had difficulty knowing why they were dropping off or why they weren’t buying our machines,” said Mathieu Bernard, ecommerce lead at T.O by Lipton.
To understand and optimize against consumer experiences on the site, Bernard turned to an artificial intelligence (AI) bot from ContentSquare.
The bot, called Arti, analyzes how user experience (UX) impacts ecommerce sales by tracking consumer actions like swipes, taps, calls and mouse movements, as well as ad visibility and exposure time, and tying it back to conversion. It then makes optimization recommendations based on specific KPIs. Arti fuels itself with data from ContentSquare about general user interactions on ecommerce sites as a basis to make more specific recommendations.
For example, if a marketer wants to increase conversions on in-app advertising, Arti will recommend how to achieve that through UX optimization, like moving an overperforming video higher up on the home screen, said Jonathan Cherki, CEO of ContentSquare.
“We are collecting every user experience – every mouse movement, every interaction on the page – to understand what to put on the page, what people are doing and if we are behind them,” he said. “We can attribute the revenue to each piece of content on a website.”
Arti’s recommendations help Bernard’s team understand bounce rates and quickly optimize to improve UX at the individual level. It also allows his team to decide how to take action and understand how the change will impact conversions.
“Ecommerce companies spend a lot of time analyzing and understanding what people are doing, but not enough time on testing and improving the consumer journey,” he said.
T.O by Lipton uses Arti across its marketing, CRM, development and design teams.
“It’s not one guy who is looking at the solution and distributing actions to people,” Bernard said. “Everyone is involved and directly responsible for the data.”
Last year, conversions increased by 105% after T.O by Lipton followed Arti’s recommendations and streamlined the checkout process. In doing so, T.O by Lipton created more opportunities to upsell their tea capsules.
Arti also helps Bernard’s team save time by up to 30% by telling it exactly what needs to be optimized. After deploying Arti, T.O by Lipton was able to speed up the pace of its A/B tests and optimizations from once per month to two to four times per month.
“When you know what the problem is, it’s not so complicated to improve it,” Cherki said.
The T.O by Lipton brand is two years old. The site saw on average 1,000 monthly visitors last year, which spiked to 1 million around peak season during Christmas.
The brand had never used an AI bot before. Arti was easy to deploy and only took about half a day to set up. It was able to start delivering insights within a few days, Bernard said. Brands don’t need to embed any tags on their page, as Arti uses a line of JavaScript to collect user interaction across the site. Training efforts were minimal.
“You don’t need to be a skilled analyst to use ContentSquare’s solution,” Bernard said.
With ecommerce platforms eating their lunch, CPG giants like Unilever, which owns T.O by Lipton, need to provide a great ecommerce experience of their own to compete, and optimizing UX can help. An owned and operated platform also gives Unilever access to more user-level data, which it doesn’t get from retailers.
“The important thing is constant optimization,” Bernard said. “You cannot optimize your web store only once a month.”
T.O by Lipton is only operating with Arti in France, but Bernard plans to scale the solution globally to optimize its website user experience against cultural nuances. Bernard expects the Unilever to scale Arti to other direct-to-consumer brands in the future.
“There’s opportunities for ContentSquare with other brands at Unilever,” he said.
