Results

The challengeFor its debut site in 2013, the JanSport e-commerce team leveraged responsive design to ensure accessibility from mobile devices. With mobile customer visits surpassing those from desktops but mobile revenues lagging behind, the company opted to go mobile-first for its new site design.

Having built hard-won equity in its legacy site, JanSport wanted to minimize the risk involved in redesign, streamline the process, and create a site that delivered on KPIs by providing an engaging on-site customer experience and smooth conversion path.

• 21% increase in mobile conversions • 700% increase in mobile clickthrough from homepage • 8X higher engagement with primary homepage messages • Efficient customer-driven redesign process

CompanyJanSportwww.jansport.com

Industry Retail

GoalRedesign the new mobile-first JanSport homepage to create a smooth, high-converting experience for the 60% of customers who visit on their mobile devices

Answer anything.

Carolina GomesDirector of E-commerce, JanSport

“There was definitely an opportunity to improve our mobile site design and revisit the homepage experience to make sure we were capturing and leveraging what customers want. We partnered with Clicktale – and it was an amazing partnership! Together, we found a true mobile-optimized homepage for JanSport which became a key growth driver of the season.”

The businessJanSport, the leading manufacturer of backpacks and collegiate apparel, is a division of VF Corporation, one of the world's largest apparel companies. Founded in 1967, JanSport introduced innovative lightweight nylon backpacks that revolutionized the way students, hikers and just about everyone else carries books, computers and other necessities of daily life. In 2013, JanSport entered the retail market for the first time with a direct-to-consumer e-commerce site.

Case Study

Why Clicktale

The solution

JanSport needed insight into the intent and behavior of mobile customers on their legacy site, and expert assistance in leveraging those learnings to design a new mobile site that makes it easy for customers to find, choose and safely purchase JanSport products while on the go. They wanted to know what customers liked about the JanSport site, what they did not, and how to improve the experience to deliver results.

Based on in-depth research and the positive experiences of its other brands, VF Digital Labs, the digital retail laboratory of JanSport’s corporate parent, recommended the Clicktale customer experience platform. In Clicktale, JanSport found a partner that could help help them understand customer needs, intent, behaviors and experiences on their legacy site. Seasoned Clicktale Customer Experience Consultants, who brought extensive knowledge of industry best practices and trends, in effect doubled the size of their small customer experience team.

Using Clicktale, JanSport took a deep dive into how customer intent and behavior drove each micro-interaction on their legacy site, and why engagement and especially conversions for customers using mobile devices underperformed that of desktop visitors. To ensure that they could accurately assess funnel performance and ROI for redesign, JanSport worked on just one site page at a time.

Starting with the homepage, they discovered that visitors rarely interacted with the images of top-selling backpacks featured directly below the homepage banner or with the rich content below them. And no wonder: Drilling down, JanSport found that less than one in four customers scrolled beyond the halfway point of the backpack images, where the fold hit. A negligible number even glimpsed the ¾ of the homepage that followed. In fact, the most extensive interactions recorded on the homepage were with the site’s top navigation menu, especially with the “backpacks” and “best sellers” categories, confirming that many customers were unaware that there even was content under the banner.

Answer anything.

Only 8% of visitors clicked on "Backpacks" in the top nav menu, the most-clicked element on the homepage. Interaction with homepage marketing messages was minimal.

Avg. Fold

#1

“By partnering with Clicktale, we noticed that our users were not interacting with any of the great marketing content that we were putting on the homepage. That was definitely alarming!"

For guidance on how to optimize the homepage, JanSport - aided by the industry knowledge of their Customer Experience Consultant – complemented lessons from their legacy site with best practices for mobile retailers. Recommended homepages practices include prominently featuring images that convey the diverse range of the retailer’s catalog so visitors instantly form an accurate picture of what they can buy.

Clear visualizations of customer behavior on the legacy site helped get the executive team behind the redesign efforts. “We get the input from Clicktale, share its importance and value with the executive team, and ask them to help us get the resources we need to get there,” said Carolina Gomes.

On its new mobile-first site, JanSport replaced the large banner with a much smaller one that allowed visitors to instantly grasp that there was a great deal to see and explore on the homepage. Four new category tiles – starting with the choices that their legacy site analysis had revealed were of greatest interest to visitors, as well as “new arrivals” and “classics” – were clearly visible under the banner, with website-exclusive offerings following below.

Carolina GomesDirector of E-commerce, JanSport

Answer anything.

The new, smaller hero banner and more visible tiles allowed visitors to instantly see that there was lots more to see and explore on the homepage.

Carolina GomesDirector of E-commerce, JanSport

“We prioritized our messages in the hero banner of the homepage, and created four different modules based on how Clicktale showed our customers navigating the top nav.”

Carolina GomesDirector of E-commerce, JanSport

“Without Clicktale, the JanSport site redesign process would undoubtedly have taken much longer and been less successful in increasing conversion. Why would anyone redesign a site based on instincts when you can get the facts to create experiences that customers crave?”

Conclusion For its mobile-first site redesign, JanSport leveraged valuable Clicktale insight about customer behavior and intent from its legacy site, as well as best practices for mobile retail sites, to rationalize and streamline the process and increase design ROI.

By focusing redesign efforts on driving KPIs and testing on one flow at a time, they optimized each customer interaction as well as overall flows to achieve impressive double-digit increases in engagement and conversion for the growing mobile-based segment of their customer base, as well as for desktop-using visitors.

About Clicktale:

Clicktale taps into the wisdom and behavior of trillions of interactions so that businesses can deliver the best digital experiences and drive amazing business results. Complex behavioral patterns are synthesized based on millisecond-level actions such as hovers and scrolls, enabling businesses to interpret their customers’ digital body language to understand intent. The pioneer in experience analytics, Clicktale marries cognitive computing, machine learning and psychological research to automatically surface issues and answer questions that keep executives up at night. With unique behavioral data, clear visualizations, and world-class customer experience expertise, Clicktale is driving the “Experience Era” at the world’s leading brands and Fortune 500 companies. Clicktale. Answer anything.

Global Offices

US: +1 415 651 4291 UK: +44 20 3318 6535

WWW.CLICKTALE.COM

Answer anything.

The impact In the back-to-school period that is crucial for JanSport, mobile conversions on the redesigned site were up 16% over the previous year. And overall, since the new homepage was launched, same-period mobile conversions increased by 21%.

Analysis of customer interactions with the mobile-first design revealed that mobile clickthrough rates from the homepage increased 700% since launch of the new site and homepage bounce rate dropped by 8.4%. Clicks on the top navigation menu decreased 3% as more visitors engaged with page content rather than immediately navigating to a category page or searching. 95% of visitors scrolled down well past the fold and were exposed to the full breadth of JanSport’s categories, up from just over one fourth before redesign.

The redesign was similarly successful for visitors from desktops, with clickthrough rates increasing 341%.

Next steps With its new homepage on track, JanSport is continuing to work with Clicktale to redesign each part of its site to optimize the mobile customer experience – search result and product detail pages, checkout, product landing pages, and more. With their traffic increasingly shifting from desktop to mobile, JanSport will continue to focus on increasing mobile conversions.