This leading consumer electronics retailer uses optimized search, merchandising and personalization tools to stay ahead of the competition.
Consumer electronics giant, Elkjøp Nordic, integrated FACT-Finder into their digital channels over a decade ago to improve their site search and optimize the online experience for their customers. The initial results were surprising: the number of search queries they received was reduced 10 times.
Puzzled, the Elkjøp Nordic team took a closer look to find out what was happening: customers were finally finding what they were looking for after the first search, making the experience in their online shop a lot smoother and more intuitive. Gone were the days of searching repeatedly for a single product by changing the wording, spelling, or order of words. In exchange for this drop in search queries, Elkjøp Nordic experienced a large boost in their conversion rate: it was a win-win for the business and for their customers.
Egil Grønn, Elkjøp Nordic’s System Manager for E-Commerce, recommends that other retailers take a closer look at the search queries they receive: “Just because you have a lot of searches, doesn’t necessarily mean that people are interested in your products – maybe they’re just struggling to find what they want.”
Elkjøp Nordic at a glance
If you are located somewhere in northern Europe, chances are you have heard of Elkjøp, Elgiganten or Gigantti, associated with Dixon’s Carphone, which holds a 25% market share in consumer electronics in the Nordics with over 400 brick-and-mortar stores.
Even before the pandemic of 2020 began, Elkjøp Nordic reported a whopping $3 billion growth in revenue. How have they come to dominate this highly competitive marketplace and remain in the lead after all these years? FACT-Finder spoke with Egil Grønn and Julie Nielsen, Senior Web-/User Experience Analyst, to hear more about what they think makes Elkjøp Nordic a leader in the industry.
Hear directly from Julie about her experiences with FACT-Finder
They both overwhelmingly reported that their teams were dedicated to constantly refining their approaches and prided themselves on being flexible by constantly evaluating opportunities. Elkjøp Nordic started very early with analyzing the nuances of the customer journey and prioritized their business development based on the findings.
Thanks to their hands-on approach, they are able to fix a lot of core issues that come up in-house instead of outsourcing to consultants, which allows them to be faster at transforming themselves digitally. Additionally, they put a lot of time and energy into using the best software solutions to keep their digital channels ahead of the competition.
It all starts with search
“Search is the core of your online shop – 90% of users that end up buying something are using either the search function, navigation, or the product filters,” remarks Egil. “And not just any search – a good search. It’s a key functionality that needs to work well, all of the time,” which is why Elkjøp Nordic has placed their trust in FACT-Finder for over a decade to deliver this key component of their digital channels.
Dynamic and personalized product filters
Elkjøp Nordic has found that users who interact with their filters are 10% more likely to convert, which makes it a clear area to focus optimization efforts. Elkjøp Nordic wanted to make their faceted search more user-friendly on mobile, so they combined the capabilities of both FACT-Finder and Dynamic Yield to make it happen.
They took the most popular filters from each of their product categories and added these to the top of the product results pages with images representing the main categories. With these small changes, they saw an impressive 4.19% drop in the bounce rate, 78% increased use of filters, and a 5.67% increase in conversion.
E-Commerce in 2020 and beyond: what has changed?
Amidst peak traffic in December of 2019, Elkjøp Nordic received 14 million visitors to one of their digital channels. In 2020, their ‘new normal’ amidst the global pandemic increased to over 18 million monthly visits per channel. Before, their online channels accounted for about 15% of their revenue; now, that figure has skyrocketed to between 50 and 70% of their revenue.
Through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Elkjøp Nordic found that their strong focus on digitalization helped them excel despite the exceptional circumstances. Market trends overall in e-commerce in the early months showed that traffic had increased for most retailers by about 20%, similar to the Black Friday season, but on the flipside, revenue took a turn for the worse and decreased by about 18%. Elkjøp Nordic, thanks to both their strong online strategies and being in the industry of consumer electronics, experienced something quite different: they had an over 50% increase in traffic and an even better increase of nearly 125% in revenue.
Bringing digital transformation to the next level with FACT-Finder Next Generation
After many happy years together, it was time for Elkjøp Nordic and FACT-Finder to strengthen their partnership even further with FACT-Finder’s latest innovation, Next Generation. Always on the lookout to evolve digitally and be a frontrunner in consumer electronics, Elkjøp Nordic was one of the first adopters of this new technology.
Egil explained that they chose to upgrade for various reasons, including the impressive out-of-the-box capabilities, improved performance, less need for maintenance and therefore fewer required resources, and the flexibility for future scaling with more digital channels and language support – a capability that isn’t possible with most other providers.
In addition to their main B2C online shops, Elkjøp Nordic decided to implement Next Generation in even more of their digital and physical channels, including four brand-new B2B channels and their in-store retail sales tool. This tool works with their POS terminals and runs through a webpage on mobile phones and tablets that indexes all products in Elkjøp Nordic’s assortment. Each index can then be optimized for the respective seller in the brick-and-mortar stores.
FACT-Finder supports businesses and scales with them, whatever the future may hold. “The ability to support API’s for live, real-time updates is also a great addition,” remarks Egil. “The installation of Next Generation was very fast and exceeded our business requirements for search and merchandising capabilities.”
Elkjøp Nordic can now show even more campaigns while boosting their conversion to new levels with search and navigation, along with providing a personalized experience based on the user’s unique preferences and location. Next Generation’s ability to support simultaneous A/B testing across functionalities is also a welcome and promising addition to the solution.
Advice from a European leader: how to get the most out of FACT-Finder
Egil insists that your number one priority before implementing any e-commerce solution is to make sure that your product data is high quality. Any solution you use will be limited by poor quality, and your results will reflect that. For example, you need the correct fields and attributes for all of your products. “You must fix the problems in your core data – if that’s right, then the search out-of-the-box set up by FACT-Finder experts leads to great results,” comments Egil.
Once integrated, try to “take advantage of all of the functionalities FACT-Finder offers; see what it is capable of without too many extra rules” added in, advises Egil. Clearly define your KPI’s and pay attention to the intelligent analytics provided by FACT-Finder to make changes to your strategies and reach your business objectives.