Canon EMEA develops a picture-perfect website with Optimizely’s experimentation solution

The Canon brand

Founded in 1937, Canon is a leading technology company dedicated to helping people reimagine and push the boundaries of what is possible through imaging.

Continuous innovation has kept Canon at the forefront of imaging excellence throughout its 80-year history, enabling the company to develop industry-leading technology to support the future demands of photographers, videographers, office workers, professional printers, medical imaging experts and more. 

The move towards direct-to-consumer ecommerce

Canon EMEA’s traditional consumer business model was built on selling the company’s wide range of digital cameras, lenses, printers and camcorders to its customers through selected retail partners. 

But a key part of the company’s future vision and strategy was to bring its products and merchandise closer to consumers through an omnichannel experience — giving its customers the option to choose how and where they wanted to purchase a product, including directly from the Canon brand itself. 

In 2015, Canon EMEA launched its very first direct-to-consumer ecommerce website in the UK, quickly expanding the offering across 17 different markets across Europe, Middle East and Africa.   

Optimising the digital experience 

A significant part of Canon EMEA’s core digital strategy was to optimize the digital experience of its brand-new ecommerce platform in order to attract the right audiences and drive an increase in conversion rates. But the company needed the ability to simultaneously experiment with different web pages across its 17 different websites in order to achieve this goal.

Canon EMEA recognized the need for a robust experimentation and optimization platform, which led the company to select Optimizely as its dedicated partner in this area. 

Optimizely is now being used across several of Canon EMEA’s business functions, but predominantly by the ecommerce team. The platform is used to carry out high velocity A/B testing across the company’s 17 different websites to understand how different site elements perform. Using various qualitative and quantitative research tools, the team are able to gather data and insights into the website’s conversion rates and traffic figures.

The testing is currently being carried out across five key website areas, including the homepage, the navigation area, product pages, and the checkout and basket pages. The test results provide the team with statistically significant results that improve the website’s conversion rate and other key metrics.

These changes made to the key site areas are then deployed across the full website to all customers. Once any pain points or problems are identified, Canon EMEA’s cross-functional in-house team — comprising of UX designers, copywriters and conversion rate optimization leads — is able to quickly make any iterations or create new test concepts to roll out across its web pages via the Optimizely platform.  

Removing the digital guesswork 

Optimizely’s experimentation capabilities have enabled the team at Canon EMEA to implement a robust experimentation programme that can run high velocity tests simultaneously across a wide range of markets. As a result, the team can turn these test results into actionable changes in order to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience across each of its different markets.

Jitender Chani, Canon EMEA’s e-Commerce Content & optimization Senior Manager explains, “Optimizely is an extremely powerful, yet simple tool to use. Through the platform, we are now able to see which test concepts are driving the highest conversion rates and how this metric is changing over time. Thanks to Optimizely we are able to set up an array of different tests in little time, which run extremely well and deliver fast results.

“Our team is now empowered to constantly review and experiment with different aspects of the customer experience, and Optimizely is helping us to remove the element of guesswork that was previously needed. This guesswork has now been replaced with data-driven results which allow us to deliver seamless, omnichannel experiences.”

While Canon EMEA is predominantly using Optimizely’s experimentation capabilities, the company has recently expanded its partnership and is now building out its personalization and content recommendation strategies using Optimizely to drive even higher conversion rates and in turn, better and bigger business outcomes.