Ecommerce

Twinings

Creating the ultimate customer experience for tea lovers

Twinings has been bringing the finest teas and freshest flavours to the lives of UK consumers for over 300 years, making it one of the UK’s most trusted brands with a global following of tea enthusiasts in over 100 countries. The Twinings team needed a flexible and functional ecommerce platform that would bring the story behind the brand to life. We built a site underpinned on user centred principles that offers personalisation and automated marketing capabilities. The solution is incredibly efficient for the Twinings team to manage, and we continue to work with the brand to support and develop its digital offering.

The agency’s ability to translate ambitious business goals into complex technical solutions that are customer focused is credit to the talent and experience of the team. Claire Blake
Ecommerce Manager at Twinings

Telling the brand story

The essence of the digital strategy is to provide customers with a flavour of the Twinings brand and experience, and to nurture not only sales, but brand loyalty and advocacy too. This was achieved through longform content for key products to illustrate their heritage and style and demonstrate the high quality ingredients as a luxury product to be enjoyed. We’ve created a site that now enables Twinings to create content to engage a loyal following and build a community of tea lovers. The Darjeerling page is an excellent example of how Twinings have achieved this. The history of the tea is conveyed through photography, illustrations and text designed to encourage exploration and engagement. The site is a reflection of the exclusive experience that visitors receive at the flagship store on London’s Strand through insight to the brand’s extensive range.

Understanding the user experience

With a clear vision of a compelling user journey, Twinings worked with our strategists to solidify navigation and functionality with wireframes and live prototypes. We’ve considered the challenges of the wide range of possible journeys a customer may take with Twinings and created personas for key audiences to make their experiences as tailored and smooth as possible.

By using Kentico's personalisation and automated marketing functionality, scenarios were built and personalised content and targeted emails have been created for an optimised user journey. This in turn encourages return visits, increasing loyalty and sales.

Visually stunning

Beautiful photography and design creates a strong visual impact for a highly engaging and enjoyable way for customers to purchase products online. An exclusive look has been created through the use of rich colours to reflect the premium nature of the products, and lifestyle imagery reinforces the brand’s association with British high society.

The use of white space enables the visitor to focus on the products and explore the range, and a delicate look has been achieved to mirror the elegance of tea drinking. High quality imagery of the products is part of the site’s appeal, naturally encouraging the customer to explore the site.

Seamless integration and ease of use

We integrated the site with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and delivery systems, SAP and MetaPack to communicate in real time for a seamless flow of data to enhance operational efficiency. The site has been developed to make it as simple as possible for the Twinings team to use to ensure they can update their hundreds of products quickly and easily.

Excellent results

Mixing heritage with market-leading innovation and style, Ridgeway have produced an online ecommerce experience for both trade and consumers that nurtures not only sales, but builds brand loyalty and advocacy all through one integrated content management, ecommerce and marketing platform.

Results

Award winning performance

This is the growth that we have seen over the most recent Christmas period from 1st October to 25th December compared to the same period in the previous year:

20%

Increase in revenue
13%

Increase in ecommerce conversion rate
16%

Increase in transactions

It's a winner!

The website was awarded Best Ecommerce Site & Global Site of the Year at the Kentico Site of the Year awards, the Wirehive Ecommerce Site of the Year, and has contributed to our ecommerce victory at the RAR Digital Awards.

Getting ready for Christmas

Seasonal gifting is an important facet of Twinings’ promotional strategy. We worked with the brand to develop a number of components and journeys to showcase its product offerings at Christmas. This included a specific Christmas gift shop and product personalisation to make gifts that little bit more special for the festive season. We also created an interactive gift finder widget, making the shopping experience easier and more enjoyable for visitors, also listing featured products for gift inspiration.

Twinings People

A global employer with offices in over 15 countries and almost 2,500 employees, Twinings People serves as the careers arm of Twinings. The department required a platform for attracting the best candidates in the market to join the team by offering a smooth job search and application experience whilst conveying the culture and ethos of the Twinings workplace. The Twinings People site is an example of our ability to reinvent and personalise an existing template from the Twinings website into a unique and functional solution for a separate arm of the business in a fraction of the time and cost usually required to build a new site.

We’re delighted with how we have managed to save time and cost by re-using the existing template, but still given the site a personality of its own. The site is easy to update and really helps us to tell the story of what it’s like to work at Twinings to ensure we attract the right people into a career with us. Sundae Spiers
HR Manager at Twinings

Optimising the site for the customer

Page weights were consciously kept light for Twinings’ on-the-go customers to ensure the best possible mobile experience. Caching and cookie use has reduced load times to deliver personalised content that customers are most likely to engage with immediately. We’ve seen a 158% increase in mobile sales year-on-year, and a 35% increase in mobile conversion rate since going live.

Since then, we’ve also added features to enhance conversion rates across devices, including quick shop functionality. Customers are now able to add products to their basket via key landing pages to speed up the buying process. A new product recommendations section on product pages ensures cross-selling and up-selling is achieved simply and effectively.

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