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How New York & Company is Optimizing the User Experience

August 6th, 2015 | 2 min. read

How New York & Company is Optimizing the User Experience Blog Feature

Zmags Blog Author

Sharing perspectives on the latest trends and tips to help eCommerce brands stay ahead to engage and drive revenue.

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Earlier this summer, New York & Company (NY&C) joined Zmags for the first in our “Master Marketer” webinar series. In the webinar, Paul Carroll, NY&C company’s vice president of digital and e-commerce creative, discussed how Zmags’ flagship product, Creator, has enabled his team to grab consumer attention, boost sales and reduce the cost of creating and publishing mission-critical digital experiences. Like many apparel retailers, NY&C uses a mix of online and in-store campaigns to sell its wares.

Prior to using Zmags, NY&C faced technical and process-based challenges in converting all of its assets to an online mobile environment. The result was a creatively limited user experience that didn’t work well, especially on mobile. One campaign with Zmags Creator for NY&C’s Sweet Pea apparel line convinced Carroll that the platform represented a simple way to put creative content and engaging experiences together. NY&C’s metrics that refer to goods “turning on a 2 or 3”– which means inventory is sold out in 2 or 3 weeks–were easily and repeatedly beaten. For example, the Sweat Pea line sold out in 0.7 weeks, an unprecedented amount of time of approximately 4 days. Since the initial engagement of using the Creator, NY&C’s website has had a 600 percent improvement in site views.

Listen to the webinar here to find out how NY&C achieved this level of success. We’ve outlined and expanded below five key takeaways from the discussion.

  1. Customers Are MobileNYC’s analysis shows that 67 percent of traffic comes via mobile devices with 54 percent from smartphones alone. This exceeds IBM’s most recent Holiday Readiness report, in March, which reported mobile traffic to retail websites reached 47.4 percent, and mobile sales reached 24.4 percent. NY&C mobile stats also exceed those in the UK; retail trade body IMRG and Capgemini (the m-Retail Sales Index) indicate over a third (36 percent) of UK online sales are now completed on a smartphone or tablet device — a figure that rises to 40 percent for clothing and apparel merchants.
It follows that creating digital experiences that work just as well on mobile is essential to capturing that traffic, and NY&C used design elements within the Creator platform to do just that. The following are two quick tips: Use vertical scrolling so that experiences work well in a mobile context. Take advantage of a handheld screen and ‘go big’ on images, maximizing the visual impact of campaigns on the smallest of screens.