Download to deliver a measurable impact on potterybarn.com

CASE STUDY | WILLIAMS-SONOMA 01
Profile
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. is a specialty retailer of high-quality products
for the home. These products, representing seven distinct merchandise
strategies – Williams-Sonoma (cookware and wedding registry), Pottery
Barn (furniture and bridal registry), Pottery Barn Kids (kid’s furniture
and baby registry), PBteen (girls’ bedding and boys’ bedding), West
Elm (modern furniture and room decor), Williams-Sonoma Home (luxury
furniture and decorative accessories) and Rejuvenation Inc. (lighting and
hardware) – are marketed through 592 stores, seven direct mail catalogs
and six e-commerce websites.
Business Challenge
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. offers more than 15,000 products on five
different websites, all with their own seasonal purchasing patterns
and merchandising needs. As one of the company’s top five customer
acquisition channels, natural search is among the larger marketing
programs at Williams-Sonoma. “We view improvements to natural
search as a continual process,” says Jessica Boland, Online Marketing
Manger at Williams-Sonoma. “We work closely with our technical teams
to make our content easier for consumers to find. In addition, we are
always looking for new ways to bring more people to our sites.”
Solution
Williams-Sonoma recognized that BloomReach’s cloud marketing
platform would create new opportunities for its businesses. “We
know a lot about how people describe our products and services and
how they look for them online,” Boland continues. “But we saw that
BloomReach’s BloomSearch could help us identify new ways that
potential customers express their needs and interests—ways that are
hard to anticipate—and make our content more discoverable for them.”
“We have been surprised with the variety in the phrases that consumers
use to find our products,” comments Holland Dauterive, SEO Specialist
at Williams-Sonoma. “It’s really eye-opening to see some of the
uncommon, “long tail” phrases that people create to describe a specific
item that they want.”
Product
BloomSearch
Impact
Incremental site visits and
revenue from natural search
<30
days
to deliver a
measurable
impact on
potterybarn.com
“Consumers describe the
products in which they
are interested in a myriad
of ways. By helping them
discover our most relevant
products when they search,
BloomSearch improves
the visibility of our brands
and gives us incremental
selling opportunities.”
— Angela Caltagirone
VP, Online Marketing, Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
CASE STUDY | WILLIAMS-SONOMA 02
Williams-Sonoma saw BloomSearch as a valuable complement to its
existing natural search programs. “BloomSearch allows us to expand
our reach in a scalable way – a way that we weren’t able to easily do
ourselves,” Boland remarks.
Implementation Has Evolved to Meet Search Marketing Needs
The process of integrating BloomSearch into the five Williams-Sonoma
sites was smooth. Over time, the BloomReach team has worked closely
with Williams-Sonoma to build upon the deployment’s early successes.
According to Dauterive, “The BloomReach team has been fantastic. We
have a lot of new ideas, and they have been great about implementing
the changes necessary to make those ideas work.”
For example, the Williams-Sonoma marketing team creates product
descriptions that often use stylized terms reflective of the company’s
brand. Consumers may use a different set of terms when they are
describing their needs. “We call it ‘cutlery’ on site, but a consumer
may be searching for ‘knives’,” Boland says. In order to make these
products more discoverable by consumers, Boland’s team partnered
with BloomReach to incorporate top user reviews into the BloomSearch
“related products” widget placed on the product and category pages
of williams-sonoma.com. Now, these products are exposed not only to
searchers using phrases found in formal product descriptions, but also
to searchers using the vocabulary that Williams-Sonoma customers use
in their reviews.
Now being
discovered on
potterybarn.com:
“a frame wine rack” “3 tier
all metal silver plated stand” “eiffel
tower tree topper” “sienna paisley
duvet cover sham”
BloomSearch Exposes More Content to Consumers
“jar pendant
light”
On potterybarn.com, the impact of BloomSearch was particularly
noticeable within the first 30 days. “The site offers a wide range of
items, including home furnishings available with a number of different
finishes and color combinations,” Dauterive explains. “BloomSearch
makes it easier for our consumers to discover these products in a lot
of different ways – for example, ‘brown media cabinet,’ ‘walnut media
cabinet,’ ‘mahogany media cabinet,’ or ‘espresso media cabinet.’ As a
result, it gave our content more exposure.”
Incremental Visits Drive New Revenue
Williams-Sonoma has seen incremental visits and revenue across all
of the five sites that have implemented BloomSearch. Conversion rates
have been consistent with other marketing channels.
BloomReach created the world’s first Web Relevance Engine dedicated to exposing the best
content on the internet to the right consumers seeking it on search engines and social platforms.
BloomReach, Inc. 399 West El Camino Real, Suite 100, Mountain View, CA 94040