Crate&Barrel Takes Mobile To Next Level

Tsuyi Li
Marketing in the Age of Digital
4 min readJul 24, 2021
Source: Crate&Barrel.com

In the last ten years or so, digital technology has started reshaping the environment of marketing. Brands are inclined to place advertisements online rather than promoting themselves harder in traditional cable services or radio. Well, when smartphones came out and their ownership is growing rapidly around the world, hundreds of thousands of brands take advantage of the trend to dedicate to mobile marketing. The supporting data shows that daily hours spent with mobile in the US is the highest among all types of devices, including Desktops and Laptops. It is an indisputable argument that implementing a mobile marketing strategy to advertise a brand generates messaging reach and impression.

A brand usually starts with a mobile version of a website while investing in mobile marketing at the beginning. But mobile marketing doesn’t work the same all the time which also includes a whole set of initiatives: SMS, Apps, Banners, Location-based, Proximity, and so on. Here, Crate&Barrel, a home goods retailer, devotes itself to mobile marketing for making the stride toward the warm and the best shopping experience for users. They desire to drive awareness and traffic from navigating their mobile activities through your finger.

What’re Crate&Barrel Mobile touchpoints?

Crate&Barrel brings its mobile touch-points and the physical world together in a beautiful seamless way. They mainly dive into mobile web, apps, and banners. Take banners which is the one effective organizational channel that Crate&Barrel’s consumers shop across. Clik-through banners resulted in a 3.48% CTR across all mobile ads and a 15% CTR on iPad ads. Impressions on media ad units reached 1 million and over 34,500 thousand users are sent to Crate and Barrel website. As online display ads, the CTR performance hit high results in producing more mobile-focused omnichannel strategies.

Source: http://alexarkoosh.com/projects/cratebarrel.html

Go Deeper Into Crate&Barrel App

With numerous shopping channels to choose from, Crate and Barrel expand the breadth of using the mobile app to service more users. The team launched the first version of the app using their internal resource only, but the app wasn’t favorable by users and wasn’t driving the completion of an order. In order to cover a full range of customer needs and deliver a faster and better commerce experience, the team cooperated with the mobile app platform GPShopper, which has valuable integrations experience, to reach the goals.

The new version is added in several features consisting of a pick-up in store, buy in-app, favorite list, and coupons. For example, you will receive 20 dollars coupons when you download the app and register for a membership. Moreover, you will be given limited-time special offer information if you turn on the notification.

Besides that, the Crate&Barrel mobile app is designed with great UX/UI. When you first open the app, white background with a black front is consistent on all pages, information placement and main product at the time are pinned on the top which is attractive and brings the shopping desire, also, the high-quality products pictures are placed in well-designed layout which are compelling and engaging. So its user design includes color palettes, images, aesthetics, icons, and more will generate higher traffic. What else? The app provides users with easy interactions and is planned with a good layout that they can quickly find what they need through clear guidelines. That maximizes usability.

Wow numbers for Crate&Barrel

As the result, the Crate&Barrel app earns a 4.8-star rating and increases 137% in download since relaunching the mobile app. Today, Crate&Barrel has 62% of app users opted in push notifications, and has boosted 82% in visit frequency, as well as has increased 43% in-app revenue. The firm is very much creating personalized promotion of goods and services to users and experience to make instant gratification tailored to either connect with consumers fast and easy or reach a higher level of customer engagement.

My takeaway

An appealing, intuitive, and aesthetically app design gives Crate&Barrel a competitive advantage in increasing customer acquisition and retention. Understanding that a good mobile app for the business allows customers to browse the store and make hassle-free purchases anywhere, even on the go, it is bound to engage maximum down-loaders, resulting in more conversions and profit. Additionally, in this fast-changing world, if a brand wants to reach consumers in real-time, the ubiquity of mobile marketing becomes indispensable.

Data source: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/378611/Crate%20and%20Barrel%20Case%20Study.pdf.

http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/casestudies/crate-and-barrel.pdf

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Tsuyi Li
Marketing in the Age of Digital

Digital Marketing Explorer / Golf-loving gal / Master’s Candidate of Integrated Marketing at NYU