New Era Caps
Personalized digital commerce for 40 markets
decrease in bounce rate
increase in conversion rate
increase in page value
New site needed to optimize conversions
Founded in 1920, New Era Cap Company are the leading global headwear manufacturer producing more than 35 million caps per year. They are the exclusive manufacturer and marketer of the official on-field cap worn by every Major League Baseball team and their Minor League affiliates across the world. New Era have also developed a very strong identity on the street and is growing its brand into apparel and across new markets.
New Era approached twentysix to develop a new and engaging website for EMEA. They needed a brand new site that would support an interactive and rich media brand experience alongside a solid, high performance e-commerce platform optimised for conversion.
The Challenge
New Era were keen to develop a new site for the EMEA region that represented the authenticity & individuality of the New Era brand as the existing site was outdated and not optimised for conversion.
Key Objectives
- Increase conversions rates
- Provide a credible, engaging and interactive experience
- Grow social footprint and engagement
- Attract a wider customer demographic
- Increase operational efficiency
64% increase in their conversion rate
THE SOLUTION
At the start of the project, twentysix conducted an extensive discovery phase, which included workshops and sessions with all the site stakeholders and audiences, both internal and external. The purpose of these sessions was to enable the project team to get under the skin of the market and its audience to ensure planning, creative and technical recommendations would firmly establish New Era as a market leader.
With all the information gathered, twentysix recommended the new EMEA e-commerce website was developed on the Episerver Commerce platform. Key requirements leading to this recommendation were as follows:
- New Era needed a fully responsive website
- The journeys needed to feature rich product filtering and searching
- The platform needed to easily manage 11k+ product SKUs
- The global site would serve over 40 European markets in 5 languages using 2 currencies
- Utilising the Episerver market management functionality to control the availability of products across various markets to implement country based licensing restrictions, ensuring products are only visible and eligible for purchase within the applicable countries
- Multiple shipping methods would be required per market with delivery exclusion rules
- The product catalogue and translation partner integration could be managed using Episerver projects and Episerver service API
During the build, the technical teams at New Era & twentysix worked closely together in integrating Episerver Commerce with the range of back-end systems that New Era utilise. Key integration points to ensure an end to end e-commerce experience were:64%
- SAP for New Era’s product and stock management
- MotionPoint for multi-lingual content based on user location
- Episerver Perform for product recommendations based on user’s site journey
- IBM Marketing Cloud for ECRM activities including cart abandonment, marketing campaigns and special offers
- A custom cap builder microsite
- Multiple Payment gateways (SagePay & PayPal)
The Results
The new EMEA e-commerce website launched in May 2016.
Key results include:
- In the 4 months since launch the average conversion rate increased by 64%
- In the 4 months since launch the average page value increased by 34%
- In the 4 months since launch the average bounce rate has decreased by 13%
In addition to the above, New Era has substantially increased operational efficiency since the launch of the new website. This is as a result of tasks that were previously manual now being automated. A key example of this is the preparation and execution of adding new product lines to the website, an action that New Era do continually throughout the year. Previously this would be a full time job for one of the New Era staff, but this has now been reduced enabling them to focus on other activities to the benefit of the company.
