Eyewear for everyone, anywhere
Zenni Optical, a pioneer and leader in the online eyewear retail space, is committed to the mission of helping people around the world “see better and live better.” Started in 2003 as a small local business in Northern California with the simple objectives of lowering the cost of eyewear and making it more accessible, Zenni Optical has quickly evolved into a leading online provider of high quality, affordable and fashionable prescription eyewear around the globe.
In addition to affordability, quality and accessibility, Zenni Optical places a strong emphasis on products that enable customers to amplify their individuality. Its unique and extensive catalog of frame and lens selection offers every man, woman and child a wide array of style options for any occasion. “We make fashion affordable,” was the sentiment expressed by Alex Dye, a product manager at Zenni, when describing the company’s product catalog.
Opportunity
With over 50 million frames already sold worldwide, Zenni is still dedicated to continuously elevating the shopping experience for existing and new customers. The millions of monthly website engagements provide Zenni with an untapped wealth of customer data that can be ‘unlocked’ to identify opportunities to elevate the shopping experience for existing and new customers.
Zennioptical.com offers customers who visit the site a comprehensive shopping experience, driven by the key elements of selection and personalization. Customers arriving on the site are immediately engaged with a personalized selection experience, starting with high level categories such as: type, style, featured selections, gender, face shape, and more. Upon selecting a category from the home page, more subcategories such as: frame shapes, lens type, color, price, etc… are presented, with the ultimate objective in helping customers select the frame and lens that best suit their needs and style preferences.
Increasing amounts of page views, click depth, and key product page visits indicate site visitors are delighted by the experience and are interested in Zenni products. However, there are still opportunities to further increase meaningful customer engagements and accelerate conversions through a more personalized experience.
With a virtually an endless selection of frames and lenses, the shopping experience can sometimes be overwhelming and cause shoppers to abandon the process. Unlike at a brick and mortar store, there are no reps readily available to make suggestions or answer questions about Zenni products in realtime.
Solution
“Zenni had many interested customers who abandoned their browsing before completing their purchase. We believed that ZEALS would help us with acquisition by providing an interactive way to engage with our products,” expressed by Dye as the primary driver for Zenni to look into a chat commerce solution.
Working closely with ZEALS.ai, Zenni successfully integrated a social chat commerce solution and deployed an even more personalized shopping experience to enhance and accelerate the frame selection process on their website.
Site visitors, at risk of abandoning the website, instantly trigger a personalized chat experience to assist them with selecting the right frame(s) by tapping on a static banner. The automated chat experience, presented in the form of a short quiz, is designed to quickly assist the user in finding products that are unique to their personal attributes. Users engage in a conversation-like chat experience, answer a few simple questions about their style preferences and eyewear usage, to generate highly personalized frame selections in real-time.
Results
- Generated an 18.00% conversion rate through automated chat experiences
- 94.40% of users completed the chat experience to get personalized product recommendations
Outlook
The initial success with ZEALS.ai has prompted Zenni’s interest in exploring other values that social chat commerce can potentially provide their business and customers. “The engagement data and analytics provided has been very thorough and helpful for our strategy. I am excited to see how the marketing piece will perform once it goes live as we can compare the data sets,” said Dye, as Zenni explores integrating social chat commerce into the paid social strategy in the near future.
In addition to incorporating chat commerce into paid channels, Zenni is also intrigued by the wealth of zero-party data generated by the chat experiences on their website. “Outside of revenue, the data the quiz provides about our customers is valuable to us because it provides insights on high intent users and what their priorities look like,” stated by Dye, as he shared his thoughts on ZEALS.ai’s ability to help generate deeper insights about their buyers.
