Signature Hardware is a brand with a strong heritage and identity. Their ecommerce website has historically flourished when it came to organic search-sourced sales. A shopper on the hunt for a very specific product was easily serviced by their website, which relied heavily on catalog category pages. But for the shopper who was looking for something more – guidance, inspiration, or education – the customer journey wasn’t as simple. Because of restrictive CMS templates, the content the marketing team was creating was basic, yet still difficult to build and hard-code.
On top of this design conundrum, Signature Hardware was faced with unique inventory challenges. With their products being sold across a wide variety of channels, they found their inventory constantly fluctuating. To avoid causing links on their articles to lead to “dead ends,” creating a frustrating experience for their shoppers, they tried not to merchandise directly to product pages so as not to have to manually audit for out of stock links – an increasingly time-consuming task, taking members of their team away from important content projects. In order to scale content marketing efforts, the content could only reference products at a category level to limit the number of links to be audited, which stifled creativity and the opportunity to generate direct revenue. They needed a way to manage the inventory that was featured outside the catalog on their website to ensure the customer journey remained smooth and effortless to travel.
To fully realize their content goals, Signature Hardware turned to the Fastr by Frontend by Zmags platform. With Fastr Frontend, they saw their content production process streamlined. And the tool’s ease of use meant that more people on the team could create and publish content, regardless of their coding experience. With this new flexibility, they now have the bandwidth to expand their creative reach and focus on more ambitious endeavors. Their content is dynamic and interactive, reflecting the vision of the brand. They can create long-form “shop-the-look” content that is rich, uniquely creative, and high-converting without a single line of code. And with live text, Fastr Frontend allows them to generate even more SEO-friendly experiences versus ones using text embedded into images.
Best of all, Fastr Frontend’s Inventory Alerting feature has completely transformed how they track inventory across their website. What was once an arduous and manual process of checking every link on every page is now automated through alerts for out-of-stock products. Instead of spending up to a week searching for these broken links, they can redirect their time to higher priority projects. By integrating with their live inventory feeds, they can create content for time-sensitive trends and sales without worrying about the negative impact of out-of-stock.
The creative power of the tool, combined with the ease and efficiency of Inventory Alerting, has had a tremendous effect on the Signature Hardware team. They are able to increase their content output – and the quality of that content – without changing the size of their team. Their content production time has been reduced by 75%, freeing up their time to expand their marketing strategy.
Inventory Alerting has completely changed how they plan and execute campaigns. They can easily track which products featured in their content have gone out of stock, allowing them to update any broken links across their site. These “dead-end” links had previously proven to derail the consumer experience and deter shoppers from purchasing. Now, they can keep up with trends and sales. A great example is their popular Game of Thrones experience. Pre-Fastr Frontend, couldn’t keep up with the broken links. Now, they’re confident their customers are receiving the best online experience possible. And it shows as they’ve seen direct revenue from entrances into the updated Game of Thrones experience since implementing it in Fastr Frontend. They’ve even found Inventory Alerting to be a convenient method to track data issues, an unforeseen but welcome result of the tool.
Signature Hardware has transformed both their online content and their internal processes. They now have a streamlined workflow that encourages creativity, and an online customer journey that encourages purchases.
Turning Creative Vision into Reality
Gift Guides That Convert
Powerful Microsites That Drive Donation
Experience Creator
In our 30-minute demo, we’ll show you how quick and easy it is to create content, and publish it, all with a few simple clicks. Even better, we’ll show you how it would look on your site. After a quick walk through some of the most compelling content our customers have created, we’ll show you a live Fastr Frontend experience on your actual website. It’s pretty cool.
