Manufacturers need to shift from offline to online ways of connecting with customers
In today’s marketplace, manufacturers and distributors need to shift from physical catalogs and shelf placement to connect with customers digitally. If a customer would like to make an online purchase and is not aware of their options, they may go directly to Amazon instead of considering other e-retailers.
ACCO Brands, a nearly $2 billion USD supplier of select categories of branded academic, consumer and business products, supplies a wide inventory of products to meet consumer needs. With the consumer journey becoming increasingly digitally focused, ACCO recognized a need to become more effective at reaching their target audience. Though ACCO Brands had an e-commerce platform, it was not cohesive as there were multiple web properties, platforms, and support teams. Just in the North American region alone, there were over 30 websites representing just six of the brands, running on more than five platforms. These digital inefficiencies are not unique to ACCO Brands and are ones many organizations of its size suffer from today.
With each brand having its own, siloed website and no way to navigate between them, potential customers had a complex journey – sometimes not being able to find what they needed as quickly as expected. This digital constraint resulted in loss of potential sales for the company despite ACCO Brands offering products that customers are loyal to. They needed to streamline the digital shopping journey so they could encourage consumers to continue buying ACCO’s branded products, either directly or through its channel partners.
Empowering retailers to deliver a great digital consumer experience
ACCO Brands’ initial plan was to purchase a content management system (CMS) to sit on top of their existing ecommerce solution. However, once they took note of the full Optimizely suite, they decided that a unified ecommerce and CMS platform was a better approach for the long term. The company liked the built-in marketing features, like the storytelling page, blogs, and personalization, which enabled the company’s marketing team to connect with customers.
Since ACCO Brands was already using Microsoft technology for some of their systems and had development teams already familiar with Microsoft Azure, the implementation of Optimizely solution went smoothly. Now with the Optimizely solution on Microsoft Azure, ACCO Brands has a fully integrated and consistent website experience to interact with customers in over 30 countries and 15 languages.