Ruggable rolls out an efficient way to manage Black Friday and personalization with Contentful

Introduction

Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year for deal-hungry consumers — and the retailers hoping to earn their business. With shoppers ready to drop cash in store and online, the pressure to “get it right” is high. It demands a technological infrastructure that can handle massive fluxes in traffic and transactions. Moreover, it demands the agility and flexibility to deliver targeted deals and eye-catching content that makes customers forget about competitors. 

Ruggable is no stranger to this anticipation and pressure. Since 2010, the ecommerce company — which specializes in selling stylish, washable rugs — would spend the days leading up to this “holiday” feverishly planning promotions. 

“To launch these promotions, a developer had to go in and manually change anything related, including the copy and design.” Dylan Feiner, Senior Product Manager at Ruggable, said. “Obviously, that's high pressure — especially with so many dollars at stake. Push the wrong code and the site could go down.”  

Associate Director of Product Management Daniel Graupensperger and Feiner both describe the experience as “nerve-racking.”

With Black Friday 2022 on the horizon, and anxiety within content and engineering growing, Ruggable began exploring platforms that could facilitate publishing time-sensitive promotions while integrating with its existing tech stack. With these operational details smoothed over, Ruggable would be able to turn its attention to building a more optimal user experience with new approaches to content, such as personalization.

Ripping and replacing platforms for a new approach to Black Friday

Ruggable decided to test out the Contentful Composable Content Platform, built on AWS, creating Black Friday landing pages as an experiment. 

Ruggable’s digital teams built out a handful of modular components to support its temporary promotions. It then connected Shopify — its ecommerce platform of choice — to pull in product data. With this library of components and much-needed information readily available, Ruggable’s Content team was able to mix, match, and assemble their desired experience — free of developer support. Their simple timesaver? Search and filtering capabilities in the UI to find just the right modules and content. This capability, which Shopify alone lacked, made content creation and curation more efficient. 

As its first Black Friday with Contentful approached, Ruggable teams took the modules they had customized and set precise publication schedules for each using the Contentful Launch app, which allows teams to preview content as it would appear on the front end and control when it goes live. 

“Well before that Friday, we previewed the content changes and then scheduled them for publication, then all we have to do is check the site to ensure it goes live. It worked great,” Graupensperger said. Impressively, this project was completed by three people in just four weeks.

With promotion-tied content changes scheduled to publish at the moment users began looking for deals, internal teams were able to sit back and watch their creative efforts drive results.

Weaving a content model to accommodate a scaling storefront

Pleased with the outcome of its first Contentful project, Ruggable set about migrating its entire website to Contentful, using the modules during Black Friday as a starting point.

New to composable content, many Ruggable team members participated in a private Content Modeling Accelerator Workshop provided by Contentful Learning Services. They left with a deep understanding of the content models best suited for their site and began auditing what content they already had. 

“Essentially, we created a website builder with Contentful,” Graupensperger said. “We can mix and match sections. We can add to pages that didn't support certain content in the past.” Right now, about 90% of the company’s website has been migrated to Contentful. Over the next few months, Ruggable engineers plan to tackle that last 10%. 

Graupensperger and his team envision a site where they have complete flexibility to reuse the modules they love across multiple areas of their site. “We want to take something that we feature on a landing page and include it on the product detail page. That customization, that composability dictated how we structured this, and so far, we’re happy with the results,” he said. 

Covering ground in other markets with new integrations

In addition to improving day-to-day creative and technical operations, Contentful is improving the digital experience for Ruggable’s global customers through localization and personalization. 

For the former, it adopted Lilt, a contentful technology partner. With this tool, Ruggable has been able to automate content translations for its international online storefronts, which cater to the German, U.K., and Australian marketplaces. 

“We can push a change, and then Lilt gets the request on their end and they sync it on the localized site,” Graupensperger said. “We don't have to touch a CSV or deal with API connections. It's great.”

For the latter, it integrated Contentful Personalization. This was a welcome upgrade from its old solution — a custom-built tool, which was prone to breaking and required significant developer support to make even the slightest change.

With thousands of rugs to choose from — all different shapes, sizes, and colors — Ruggable needed a way to help customers narrow the options and find the perfect fit. They also needed to ensure that customers visiting the website from a campaign ad received content that aligned with that messaging and imagery. 

Leveraging Contentful Personalization, Ruggable can personalize experiences or make changes to those they previously set up in less than an hour without leaving the Contentful interface. They can also quickly onboard new members to use the tool. 

“Even without any technical background, Contentful Personalization is user-friendly.” Taejae Ha, Special Projects at Ruggable, shared. 

Ruggable's biggest success with its new personalization platform came from showing personalized hero banners and pages to audience segments that came to their website from an ad. For these individuals, click-through rates were 7x higher! Ruggable didn’t stop there. It began personalizing homepage products based on email campaigns, which resulted in a 25% increase in conversions. 

Graupensperger considers personalization to be “integral to Ruggable’s business” and credits Contentful Personalization with helping the company make great achievements without requiring additional resources or headcount to get the job done. 

Rolling out an entirely new use case

With a successful Black Friday behind them, Ruggable saw the power of composable content and Contentful. Now, the company is pushing to expand its digital ecosystem using Contentful. Next on the docket is migrating its blog, which currently lives on WordPress. Building out additional localized marketing sites is a second project which will run in the background.

For Ruggable, the right content solution was one that would change operations and improve content delivery on the busiest shopping day of the year. With Contentful, Ruggable achieved that — and so much more. It got an agile ecommerce site, better localized content, and, once its blog is migrated, a single, unified content hub.