Josh McDonnell speaks with General Pants Co. general manager eCommerce Paula Mitchell about how the brand managed to make the top 10 list for mobile readiness in Australia and how mobile played a valuable role.
Can you talk us through the digital strategy in place that has contributed to General Pants appearing in the top 10 list for digital readiness?
I think our strategy overall is tightly aligned to the requirements of our millennial audience.
They are very mobile and have such high expectations for dynamic and intuitive mobile customer experience. So we didn’t really have any other choice than to listen a deliver a solution that they are going to respond to.
What were some of the trends you were seeing that contributed to your strategy?
I think, like everybody, mobile traffic started to out perform desktop traffic two or three years ago and we were seeing that happen with the General Pants website.
Yet the conversation wasn’t following suit and I know today that's still the case, with a lot of players still lacking but our conversation was kind of light years behind.
We needed to do something with our mobile experience to improve it and drive that conversion and make it easier for our millennial audience to shop on their phone.
What has been the key element of the mobile strategy?
We started with our site redesign over 18 months ago. It took six months for us to get to a place where we were happy to roll it out.
The key focuses around our mobile site were the menus, the navigation, the search, different functions, we needed to improve our search results and just the imagery that we were using and limiting the copy.
This also included providing a nice clean aesthetic that was easy to navigate and easy to complete a checkout purchase on.
What is the split for General Pants in regards to desktop and mobile?
Now we are seeing a 50/50 split of revenue across mobile and desktop.
Is desktop developing or is it now more mobile focused?
We have a natural year-on-year lift in traffic, which you would expect with the amount of digital marketing activity, yet we are seeing the majority of that traffic heading towards mobile. So our traffic is 65% percent mobile.
How does that impact on retail operations? Does more online engagement lead to less in store?
Not necessarily, we are traditionally a bricks and mortar retailer and our objective is that we would like our customers to shop anywhere, anyhow, any time, across any device.
There is a key part of our strategy moving forward to use mobile to drive footfall but also giving the customer that device in their hands to do research and make decisions and if they choose to shop online or in-store it doesn’t matter to General Pants, we are just happy for them to be a customer.
What are some of the key challenges with the digital strategy?
I think there is not enough time in every day.
With our roadmap being so long there are so many things that we want to achieve, that need to happen in a certain order. So resourcing is always a challenge.
We want to make sure we make smart business decisions with what we are doing and we want to test and learn so we can spend a little bit of money on the concept and then deliver it to the wider audience but that takes time again.
What are some of the opportunities?
The opportunities will always be around optimising that end-to-end seamless experience.
To me personally it's about providing customers with choice and letting them decide how they want to interact with our brand.
We just need to keep optimising, learning and refining so they find shopping with General Pants in any channel a pleasurable and low maintenance experience.