Coach.com’s rules for content

By JENNIFER OVERSTREET | Published: JULY 17, 2013

Be the first to comment | This entry was posted in Events, Marketing, Merchandising, Retail Companies

For millions, it’s easy to love Coach. The brand’s style is clean, classic, and functional, with just a touch of whimsy. But Coach is more than just handbags, and it wants to mean more than just handbags to its customers. With around 4 million visitors a month, Coach.com is a gateway to the brand and an essential part of not only its image, but also its customer experience. So it’s essential that the site is engaging, tells the bigger brand story and, of course, sells merchandise. During Shop.org’s Online Merchandising Workshop on Tuesday, Coach Vice President and Creative Director for New Media Colleen Stokes and Vice President of E-Commerce Tracey Strauss shared an inside before-and-after look at how the organization refreshed its website.

Coach started by focusing on four key things: navigation, the category grid, the product detail page and storytelling. You can already see the changes on Coach.com. Note the top navigation on the homepage and the clean and simple product detail pages. Focusing on product photography led to subtle but important changes that show products being used and using real models instead of mannequins.

For the ever-important storytelling objective, the Coach team focused on creating content. But content isn’t just pretty fluff. Creative web content has to meet three important strategic requirements:

1. Be relevant. Know your customer.

2. Be optional. Don’t ever make a customer watch a video if all she wants to do is buy a bag.

3. Be focused on the product. Big, beautiful photographs on the Coach site not only show off the merchandise but also make it easier to purchase. Users can hover the mouse and the name and price of the featured product pops up.

The speakers gave examples of the kinds of content that work for Coach. Some simply integrates with a larger brand campaign in stores, print, and other media, while Coach’s latest collaboration with the Sartorialist fashion blog, “Summer in the City”, which captures “Coach on the Street,” is now is featured prominently throughout the website and on social media such as Coach’s Facebook and Pinterest pages.

Content produced for product collaborations include this very cool baseball collection that was featured with a 3D photography look for Father’s Day

 

So how does the new and improved site perform? As with any redesign, the process is continuous and involves a lot of user testing, so the team is still in the early stages of refreshing and gathering data. But Stokes and Strauss said they’ve seen positive results so far: higher traffic to the right pages, lower bounce rates, and more customers finding what they want and finding it faster.

via Shop.org Blog http://blog.shop.org/2013/07/17/coach-coms-rules-for-content/