Godiva Uses Technology to Elevate Online Customer Experience

Ecommerce officials at Godiva Chocolatier wanted to significantly elevate the online customer experience through conversational and lifestyle-driven digital experiences that engage their customers as a part of the Godiva brand experience.

Given Godiva’s small team, it had been limited in its ability to create and launch experiential content equipped with robust digital functionality.

According to Christine O’Brien, site merchandise manager who manages Godiva’s digital campaigns, the company has a growing customer demand to learn more about Godiva’s heritage, product quality, and production process, along with interactive content such as recipes and entertaining tips.

Godiva struggled to launch this scope of digital content on a regular basis, according to a case study with Zmags, the shoppable content company. To expand content in 2016, Godiva needed a scalable solution to generate rich content for an elevated site experience, which meant getting content up faster and making it easier to any member of the team to design and publish amazing experiences without any need to code.

Enter Zmags Creator.

“Creator has enabled our small team to make a big impact,” O’Brien said. “We’re now delivering more elevated experiences for our customers online, while at the same time dramatically reducing the effort needed to create those experiences.”

Creator’s drag-and-drop functionality reduced the amount of coding needed. Creator has a Demandware cartridge, meaning it integrates with Godiva’s Demandware ecommerce platform for easy “shop the look” functionality, and it simplified publishing rich content pages. The tool was easy for non-technical staff to learn, including the marketing team, allowing for updates at any time of the day.

Having just hand-coded a time-consuming new gift guide for Christmas 2015, Godiva’s ecommerce team was excited to compare that process with its inaugural Creator campaign, Valentine’s Day 2016, which is one of Godiva’s biggest campaigns of the year.

Celebrity spokesperson Eva Longoria anchored the campaign and Godiva used Creator to build an online look-book showcasing Eva’s top six gift picks. As compared to historical online celebrity appearances, this campaign generated a 300% conversion rate lift year over year.

“This campaign helped to bring excitement to our website in a way we could not offer in the past,” O’Brien said. “For the first time, the team has the creative freedom to focus on building an amazing experience without worrying about the back-end coding.”

In the first few months of using Zmags Creator, Godiva has realized a staggering 380% increase in productivity and creative output—and O’Brien expects that number will only increase as more colleagues are brought onto the team to participate in the Zmags platform.

O’Brien said the Zmags Creator helps build more experiences and better experiences. It adds rich elements such as videos, animations, and social sharing is as simple as drag-and-drop, and they’re not chained to rigid templates anymore.

Moving to Creator has also fundamentally changed how the team works. It is now able to spend more time thinking about their content strategy. What’s more, it has more bandwidth to dig into metrics to find out what’s working and what’s not, and can reflect site changes on demand. 

Recent Content

Membership and Pricing

Videos and podcasts

Membership and Pricing