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Retailers on Retail

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ECOMMERCE

User research, digital intelligence, and a testing-obsessed mindset: The recipe for success according to Moss Bros

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As Head of eCommerce at Moss Bros, Matt Henton knows a thing or two about digital marketing. Having been with Moss Bros for the past seven years, Matt’s responsible for everything the brand delivers online. “My job is getting people to visit our website, and crafting digital experiences that support and showcase the products we have and the services we provide,” he explains.

About Moss Bros

Moss Bros is the UK’s number one men’s formalwear retailer. Their mission? To inspire, guide, and help men feel amazing whatever the occasion. “And we've been around for a very long time,” says Matt, “Since 1851!”

During that time, Moss Bros has adapted and expanded its services in line with changing consumer demands. In 2022, there are now four parts to Moss Bros’ business.

“Firstly, there's our ready-to-wear menswear across both formal and casual wear ranges,” explains Matt. “Then we've got our custom-made tailoring service called Tailor Me which allows customers to choose from 1000s of different styling options, fabrics, linings, and buttons to craft their own design.”

On top of this, Moss Bros’ most famous offering is their hire service. “That’s what a lot of people know us for,” says Matt. “This offering is very occasion-led, so people hiring for weddings and black tie events—that kind of thing.”

And finally, their latest venture: Moss Box, a subscription-based business launched in 2021. “Subscribers can have any two items from a Moss Box collection at any time, swapping them as many times as they like. We take care of delivery and cleaning. And if you love something, you can keep it!” he explains.

Preparing their website for success

With seven years’ experience at Moss Bros, plus previous roles including Head of eCommerce at luxury fashion retailer my-wardrobe.com and Marketing Director at parts retailer eSpares, Matt has a wealth of eCommerce knowledge at his disposable.

So how does his team prepare for success throughout the year?

“We’re an optimization-focused team at Moss Bros,” he explains, “We love getting under the skin of our visitors and analyzing what they’re doing on-site. We take pride in uncovering their pain points and finding the areas of friction that are stopping them from doing what they want to do.

For Matt, understanding his customer’s digital behavior on the deepest level, then implementing changes to make their lives easier is the name of the game. “We just love coming up with better ways of doing things.”

For this, Matt and his team use Contentsquare’s advanced intelligence platform to analyze their customer behavior, diving into individual page performance and in-depth customer journey analysis to better understand what their customers are doing. They also feed testing and personalization data from Dynamic Yield into the Contentsquare platform to see how different A/B tests are performing. “We then use all of this data to help craft better experiences for them,” he says.

Alongside Contentsquare and Dynamic Yield, Moss Bros works closely with Endless Gain; a research agency that uses biometrics, psychology, and experimentation to optimize customer experiences and improve conversion rates. “They help us run testing sessions where we get remote volunteers to try various tasks on-site,” Matt explains. “We watch how they perform the tasks and ask them to explain any difficulties they're having as they go.”

This mix of qualitative and quantitative data helps Moss Bros paint a thorough picture of their customer behavior. And armed with these insights, they’re able to continuously adapt and improve their site to better cater to their users’ preferences.

 

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A data-driven approach to design

“One of my favorite recent projects was a relaunch of our checkout design,” continues Matt. “We did a load of research around how customers were interacting with the checkout, using these behavioral insights to make a data-driven decision about its updated design.” As well as running usability sessions with Endless Gain, Matt used Contentsquare to analyze exactly how customers were moving through the checkout funnel.

 

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“In the end, we completely turned the journey on its head,” laughs Matt. “We wanted to let our customers pay via PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay—to give them a one-click checkout journey—which meant we had to change a lot of things around.”

This meant reengineering their checkout process which, unsurprisingly, came with a lot of challenges. “We began testing across a small proportion of our overall traffic to understand how users were interacting with the changes,” he explains. “We went back and made changes off the back of their feedback, and then tested again and again.”

But the testing paid off: Moss Bros’ checkout process now performs better than it did before. “The conversion rate of the new checkout funnel is currently running about 10% better than the old one,” he says. A testament to the power of qualitative and quantitative data.

 

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Matt’s key learnings

So what is Matt’s best advice for other digital professionals? “Firstly, I think it's about having a relentless focus on trying to understand what your users are doing,” he says. And for that, he has one key question:

“What differences in online behavior can you spot between the people who are doing what you want them to do and the people that aren’t?”

If a customer has spent time browsing products and adding something to their bag, they’ve already committed quite a lot of effort to your brand. So understanding exactly what’s causing some of them to bounce before purchase is paramount. “It’s about getting under the skin of exactly what’s going on there—why are they bouncing and what can you do about it?”

And finally, Matt suggests “testing as much as you possibly can.” Why? “Because, ultimately, it’s the only way to understand what people are doing and what approach to a particular page or journey works best.”

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