From mailorder to e-commerce 2008-2010

E-LETTERS/CAMPAIGN/Webb – 7 countries

During my years working within the field of marketing some companies have impressed me more than others and Cellbes is one of them. People who don’t know this brand are not familiar with the great relationship and trust they have with their customers. This is a company within retail that almost constantly provides good results, every year, with few exceptions.

I will share some glimpses of e-commerce from the early days, back in 2008. When did the e-commerce era actually start at Cellbes? It probably did before I entered the doors but I also contributed some important steps. The staff at the Internet department grew a lot at this time. I had the opportunity of working at Cellbes as a consultant to do the Art Direction and to participate furthering the e-commerce effort. My responsibility was handling all the art direction of the campaigns in 7 countries for the company, and have them all come out published in time, as planned. I was happy to be a part of a great team led by Yvonne Eriksson, former CEO at Cellbes. The sales exceeded all expectations during these years… Oh yeah we had a little down as well, during 2008 but that turned around surprisingly quick.  Our customers were wonderful and I am sure they are today as well. It almost felt like a crush towards those ladies trying to get to know them through digital work.

This is a small recap of my part of a big transformation within this big, honorable company within retail. We tried at least two different mailing systems, we did a redesign of the web shop a few times. The start page was constantly changing along with different periods of the year. We lined up processes for translation, processes for producing in seven languages. When I was hired at the Internet department for this company I was the only one doing these campaigns, with a little help. We increased the team a lot during these two years. Suddenly I got good help with a lot of things like writing texts, doing the newsletters, and producing campaigns for different countries.

This company was founded in Borås. The capital of e-commerce in Sweden. We went from a few e-letters a month to sending one every week to all our different countries and in addition also a lot of marketing and giveaways. A newsletter is very fun to compose. Above you see some examples of what I did every week for two years. I made the look and feel of product pages & newsletters. My designs were also run in six other countries outside Sweden. Even if I did the designs I had lots of help from the team such as producers, creative director, copywriter etc. I haven’t mentioned all other persons at the help support, translators, print department etc. etc. Lots of great people with a great knowledge about retail and e-commerce.

When I start designing I always fill up with information and content in my head. After that I make a puzzle of how to get it looking nice, promote selling and technically good. I always follow the path of the graphic profile of the company and when I know the profile I also know where I can go outside the box. This requires a lot of my knowledge within UX/UI design and interaction which I see as common sense and normal thinking. You want the customer to read and look at what you provide to them.

• Figures: This company hired me to make the campaigns for their website and newsletters within retail. The newsletters were sent out in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine. 1 million receivers at the most, in one batch, for just one country. Best open rate was 60% (!) and that, as you might understand, is exceptional. That is the result of hard, long dedicated work of the whole team creating trust between the company and its customers.
• Efficient new template for newsletters: During this time we increased sales and went into new countries so I needed to think efficiently. I designed a new template for e-letters that was easier to copy, translate and update for the producers. We saved a lot of time by doing it this way. Every letter also had several landing pages with the same look and feel. You see an example of one on top of this page. Of course with different cultural variations taken into account.
• Added value: Except for products in stock, and doing these letters according to the market plan I always wanted to fill the letters with “something extra”, a value for the reader. Sometimes it could be a recipe, a story of the company or something else. Something that wasn’t a direct call-to-action for sales but anyway I think bettered the general conversion rate over time. I wanted to build more trust in the long term. I am also very interested in the interaction so that the message will lead to desired action. (Ant BTW, I also participated in creating the overall market plan.)
• Customer profiling:  Every time I sent a newsletter. I wanted to keep track of the statistics. What made them open this particular ad? Why didn’t they choose this photo? Every statistic for a letter was like a part of a puzzle to me. Very interesting and I got to know the focus group very well. Fun part of the job I think.

Redesign of an Ecommerce site

During this time I also did the redesign of the start page with some new features that would make it more worthwhile for the visitors. Since we had 7 countries to manage we needed to automate some of the things so it happened something new every time a person visited us in Cyberspace without us needing to do that by hand. We decided to implement a top list and a carousel of different product groups showing special prices of chosen items etc. One thing we discussed a lot before implementing were reviews. That was something I personally was longing for. A way for me to see what the customers want and like in their own words. Something to interpret. Today that is common everywhere and that helps the customer to choose or not to choose a size or product. I was really happy when we did implement this. As soon as we implemented the reviews I started using them in my designs. What could be better than one customer telling another that this is fantastic. Don´t miss the handsome guys wearing the nice jacket 🙂

Down below you see the start page of Cellbes with a Summer feeling. We are also having some fun with tip for mothers day and that included a recipe of the strawberry cake you see in the photo. We (me and copy writer Anna Sevo) had a lot of fun while creating this and the day we unpublished the recipe from the website the customer service got so many calls wondering where it had gone. We had to do a part of recipes on the website instead 🙂

Thank you for reading and getting a few glimpses from my time at this e-commerce company in Sweden.

After these years I have had other fun tasks within art direction but within other segments. Lot of them are in B2B. I am always curious and ready to dive into something new and wonderful.