500+ employees
Salesforce Customer since 2017

36%

sales increase across all devices

 
 

Prénatal gives customers a next-generation shopping experience with Salesforce

If you live in the Netherlands, the chances are you can’t hear ‘baby’ without thinking of Prénatal. In fact, the iconic one-stop-shop for all things baby is so synonymous that parents-to-be plan their shopping trips to coincide with the store’s biannual sales, which can draw up to several thousand concurrent visitors to the web shop alone.

Prénatal customers don’t just have access to a wide range of baby products and fashion, they get an exceptional, omnichannel customer experience to match. And, since launching Commerce Cloud in 2017, shoppers enjoy a seamless online buying experience with smarter features that makes finding and ordering the right products a breeze.

“With Salesforce, we can give customers the fast, mobile-friendly, feature-rich ecommerce experience they’ve come to expect,” said Daniel Dunk, Prénatal’s Ecommerce Manager.

Boosting ecommerce with a whole new website

Prénatal has more than 20 megastores, a number of smaller branches, and a handful of fashion boutiques across the Netherlands, selling its own designs and collections of products for expectant parents and children up to four years old.

But pre-2017, its website was crying out for an upgrade. “Our old platform wasn’t optimized for mobile and lacked scalability,” explained Dunk. “Setting up promotions involved a lot of manual work and testing, but we never knew how well the website would cope with peaks in demand.”

When it was time to relaunch the web shop, Prénatal partnered with Ordina to create a minimum viable product (MVP) to optimise core functionality. The company identified that transforming the mobile experience was key, with high volumes of traffic but a low conversion rate.

And, in the first year the website was live, mobile sales increased by 103%, driving an overall sales increase of 36% across all devices. “The success of our mobile site is completely down to Salesforce – the improved browsing experience saw 17% more sessions with a 62% increase in conversion rate, and an average order value 7% higher than previously,” added Dunk.

Improving the browsing experience at every touchpoint

Other opportunities identified to improve the user experience included making the website simple to navigate, streamlining the checkout based on Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) to reduce dropped sales, and integrating the solution with a marketing tool to create abandoned cart journeys.

“Commerce Cloud’s enhanced search function resulted in a 27% increase in organic search sessions and made it much easier for customers to find what they were looking for,” added Dunk.

Einstein product recommendations also display relevant products to customers on product pages or when they add items to their cart. During AB testing, this was proved to increase average cart spend by 8%, and the team is currently planning to roll out AI-powered search capabilities to further improve the experience.

Salesforce also simplifies scheduling promotions, reducing hours of manual work for the ecommerce team. “Now, when we run promotions, we have total assurance that there won’t be any mistakes and the website can handle peak volumes – in fact, during the COVID-19 pandemic, online orders tripled at some point without a hitch,” commented Dunk.

The solution is also flexible and agile, allowing the team to make small changes quickly and seamlessly. For example, Dunk used Lightning Scheduler to give customers the ability to book an appointment to visit a store when government restrictions limited the number of customers allowed on site at any one time.

Taking the shopping experience omnichannel

Providing an omnichannel experience is a key priority for any modern ecommerce strategy, and Prénatal, which is known for going the extra mile to help customers make informed purchasing decisions, used Salesforce to replicate its in-store ‘stroller experience’ online.

At Prénatal megastores, customers can test a range of strollers on different surfaces to get a feel for how easy they are to manoeuvre in a real-world setting. There’s also a car parked in the store so parents can check how easily the stroller will fit into the boot before purchasing. 

But, strollers can also be customised with a range of accessories and colours to perfectly meet the customer’s needs. “The last thing we want is for online customers to have to go looking for different components for their stroller. Ordina helped us build a fun interactive tool so people can configure the stroller and add it to their cart in one click,” revealed Dunk.

And, customers in-store aren’t missing out – there are kiosks where they can access the website and place their order for home delivery or to pick up in store later via pay and collect. “When customers order items in-store for home delivery we always cover the carriage fees so they’re not out of pocket after travelling or parking. It’s popular for bulky items but it also gives them access to more sizes and colours for other products and bigger range of stock at smaller branches,” said Dunk, who noted the kiosks boosted stores sales by 3% from the first day they went live.

Kiosks also act as a knowledge bank for employees, who can quickly look up product details to better serve customers. This is crucial when the company stocks more than 10,000 items and helps staff and customers to benefit from time invested in optimising product data on the website.

Making smarter decisions based on real insights

With better access to data, Prénatal has made smarter decisions to tailor the ecommerce experience to have maximum impact. For example, analysing returns data helped it identify where product descriptions could be improved with more comprehensive information, and it discovered that a significant number of returned packages had incomplete addresses.

To combat this, the team integrated a solution via an API to autofill the delivery address using the postcode at the checkout, which also saves the customer time. “Some other APIs we’ve integrated to add more value to the customer include a function to check the balance on a gift card and a banner displaying reviews,” said Dunk. “A third-party company prompts customers to leave a review in exchange for activating their guarantee, which also acts as a trust mark to give shoppers greater peace of mind.”

Since relaunching the website, customers are spending an average of 5% more time browsing the website, but a bigger shift has happened behind the scenes – the ecommerce team has more than doubled in size and can now focus on optimisation and cross-selling instead of maintenance.

Unlocking the power of personalisation in the future

Next on the agenda, the company is planning to roll out Marketing Cloud to create customer profiles that will help to personalise the shopper experience and align in-store and online purchases to unlock 360-degree visibility. “We don’t want to be sending people personalised offers for items they might have bought in-store,” explained Dunk. “Salesforce will help us get a bigger picture of what they already own and items that might complement them, so we can really offer added value to them when we reach out.”

And that’s not all. Prénatal will also be rolling out Service Cloud to empower the team with better visibility of the customer before they’ve even answered a call. Support staff will also be better informed on the status of repair work carried out by third-party suppliers and can keep customers updated until the ticket is closed.

“When we’ve perfected our offering in the Netherlands we’ll start thinking about breaking into new markets, where more babies are born every year,” said Dunk. “Salesforce gives us the scalability and confidence to bring our dreams to life.”

 

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