L’Occitane Increased Conversions by Better Understanding Users in Different Markets

L’Occitane noticed a large discrepancy in checkout page conversion between markets. For example, it noticed that dropout was much higher in Russia and China than in other regions. The company therefore wanted to quickly understand how user behaior differed in each of its key markets so that it could then optimize the checkout UX and ultimately boost ROI.

L’Occitane selected ContentSquare, an APN Advanced Technology Partner, to help. Contentsquare engaged by conducting a step-by-step analysis of the checkout process, and identify checkout struggle points specific to each market.

The behavioral metrics surfaced insights about in L'Occitane's Russian market, which at the time had the lowest conversion rate. For instance, on the delivery page, users in Russia hesitated 13 seconds longer than the international average. This was time spent finding the difficult‑to-locate address modification button, which is a function Russia-based visitors use more than those in any other country.

Russian users also engaged more with the assurance elements than did peers, with the call center contact being clicked 2.52 times more frequently in Russia than elsewhere. Despite this, the assurance bar containing important shipping and contact information was placed low on the page, with only 30% users scrolling far enough to view it.

L’Occitane worked with Contentsquare by using its Sunburst tool to map all user checkout journeys, beginning with the Shopping Bag page. This Sunburst helped teams visualize where Russian visitors dropped off. For example, the overall drop-out rate was 11% on the Gifts & Samples page and 18% on Shipment, well above the international average.

By understanding the behavior of their international users and making targeted, data-driven UX improvements, L’Occitane achieved an overall 15% lift in conversion rates.

Being able to collect and store data on a very large scale is key to Contentsquare being able to fulfill its promise to brands, and today the platform uses more than thirty AWS services. AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) enables affordable storage on a massive scale, in multiple regions, and with an impressive durability guarantee of 99.99%. Adopting an integrated service like AWS CloudFront allows Contentsquare to guarantee its clients 100% availability of its tracking system and a speedy load time for its tracking tag. Using the AWS Redshift as its data warehouse, Contentsquare can access several dozen TBs of data using SQL without any of the maintenance headaches associated with administering a database cluster — a huge time and resource saver.

AWS cloud services encourage full user autonomy, and, in six years of use, Contentsquare has never run into any major issue with any of the services, and the support team has been very responsive when needed.

Another key benefit of using the AWS platform is that it allows Contentsquare to include open-source technologies for a more customized solution to its data-related needs.