Doubling down on elevated content
Doubling down on elevated content
Achieving +10% higher engagement and 3x higher conversion rate with elevated content experiences
Achieving +10% higher engagement and 3x higher conversion rate with elevated content experiences
Inspiration is becoming a key driver of the fashion shopping journey, especially among digital native customers. Video formats in particular are in high demand and becoming increasingly important by the day. Therefore, Zalando is constantly looking for opportunities to offer customers an even more engaging, inspiring and fun experience by including high-quality visual content that serves their individual needs.
Over the past years, Zalando has continuously improved, rethought and elevated the content experience in the Fashion Store – for example with Stories on Zalando, a recently launched visual-first content hub. Now, elevated content is making its way into more and more areas of the Fashion Store. We have sat down with Matthias Haase, Director Zalando Content Solutions, to understand what these elevated content experiences are and how they help customers to make better buying decisions.
Matthias, first of all, help us understand: What is elevated content?
Elevated content describes premium or high-quality content that goes beyond the standard presentation of products online. Back in the day we used to have products displayed in front of a plain white background. Now, with elevated content there is a much greater focus on product details, aesthetics, and innovation than before – for example when you see a running shoe displayed in a fitting environment instead of a white background or have a video that shows the product in action.
This kind of content creates engagement beyond purchase transactions, and we also see this reflected in our numbers. Elevated content has a +10% higher engagement than standard product shots. For video content, the impact is even greater: Customers are 3x more likely to buy the product than when just seeing images while also returning less items. This means elevated content helps customers make better buying decisions.
How expensive is it to produce this kind of content at scale?
This is a great question and I can tell you that it’s become a lot less expensive since the rise of generative AI. Thanks to this new technology, we no longer need to build a set to shoot elevated content for each product as we did for a long time. Instead, AI allows us to generate background images at scale at a much lower cost. This doesn’t mean that we’re not doing classic photoshoots anymore but rather that we can allocate capacities and budget differently and focus on bigger, more impactful campaigns.
AI is indeed disrupting many industries. How do you envision the future of content creation?
There’s no denying that AI will change the way creatives work. In the future, content production will increasingly focus on creativity, speed and scale to always strive for an improved customer experience and to become more locally relevant. We aim to leverage AI to ensure we are providing our customers with relevant content that captures local and micro trends driven by local events, cultural moments, social media and more.
One example of this is “Barbiecore,” a trend that was triggered by the release of the Barbie movie and surfaced immediately after. The fast pace of such trends and the evolving customer demand that comes with it require content to be produced fast to meet customer expectations. AI empowers us and our partners to do so and produce content in near to real time to capture such fast-evolving trends. At the same time, we’re also working on new and equally important projects where AI does not play a significant role in the content production process.
Can you share more about those new projects you just mentioned?
Happy to do so! I already mentioned that video is becoming a much more important format. And this doesn’t only apply to the product detail pages online. We are also seeing a high and growing interest in live shopping, especially among digital native customers.
We have already tested various live video formats in the German-speaking region using the Zalando app over the past years to understand what formats customers enjoy and how we can offer a valuable experience to them.
Now, we’re going one step further by starting a weekly live show for our Beauty category. We know 80% of our Beauty customers would enjoy having even more product information than what they already see online. With this new format, we can offer our Beauty customers an even more interactive way of discovering products and finding what they love on a weekly basis. We’re excited to see how customers will interact with that!
With video becoming a more important format, what are your plans to capture this evolving customer demand in addition to live show formats?
There’s one very exciting pilot that I can tell you a bit more about: Together with Germany’s leading streaming service RTL+, we’re piloting a new offer: In-Stream Shopping. This means that viewers of “Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten,” one of Germany’s most popular TV shows, can now pause their stream and buy the items they see on screen or similar ones directly on Zalando without leaving the streaming experience. We know customers are inspired in many different ways and TV series are definitely one of them. Therefore, we’re super excited to offer this inspiration paired with a direct multimedia shopping experience for the first time and learn how customers like it.
Thank you for all those insights, Matthias, until next time!