DFS optimises online content

Using the platform, DFS can rapidly update its online and mobile store to promote trending products, based on insights from its busy call centre. As soon as products are identified as ‘best sellers,’ DFS can give them greater prominence in its online store to further boost sales.

 

Before installing Amplience, the existing process and technology forced the international retailer to wait until the following day for to make the changes to the site, losing out on vital sales opportunities. 

Now a small non-technical team can use the AMP to make changes to the site within 30 minutes. This increased responsiveness allows DFS to capitalise not only on sales peaks driven by scheduled marketing campaigns, but also transient day-to-day trends. Simply making a product the ‘lead’ on a category page can boost sales significantly.

 

Boxing Day was the busiest day for DFS over the festive period this year, with site visits nearly doubling compared to the run rate. On this day, content engagement peaked at 66% and conversion rates to product pages increased 60% over the run rate.

 

Russell Harte, head of delivery and multichannel at DFS, commented: “Boxing Day is one of the busiest trading days of the year at DFS, and by using the Amplience platform, we can be confident that even in the face of peak traffic the quality and load times of our site imagery will not suffer. Using Amplience, not only can we promote products, but we can also create a rich, adaptive user experience for our customers without burdening them with long page load times.”

The retailer also uses Amplience Dynamic Media (DM) to ease the strain of increased traffic by storing merchandising and promotional assets in the cloud. As its website views clock up over Christmas, DFS’s images load from the Amplience server rather than adding pressure to its own. This enables business-as-normal performance even on the busiest days.

 

The Amplience DM solution allows DFS to use richer and more detailed media across all e-commerce channels. Each image is served from one master asset, automatically optimising the image or video for the requirements of the device it is requested by. As well as improving user experience for customers, this is also valuable for in-store sales staff who are able to use tablets to demonstrate additional colours or designs that are not available in the showroom.

 

“Furniture items are big ticket purchases and our research has demonstrated that images play a large part in the customer’s decision-making process. A large range of high quality images is a crucial business tool,” added Harte.

 

James Brooke, Amplience founder and chief executive highlighted that multi-screen customer journeys are the norm now, but present retailers with new requirements. “These [journeys] are a challenge for retailers that want to deliver consistently rich experiences that can be rapidly changed in line with merchandising requirements. Amplience Dynamic Media removes the need for retailers to upgrade their entire image library with each new technological advancement, instead delivering an image of the required resolution (however high or low) from one master asset. This ensures that online stores look their best whatever device they are viewed on.”

 

DFS currently stores a library of 125,000 images on the cloud via Amplience, for deployment right across its transactional sites as well as instore digital signage and other marketing materials.

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