Coleman.com Reinforces Brand Loyalty with MondoSearch
We have achieved our goal of understanding the behavior of people who visit our site through the BehaviorTracking feature. For example, we can now see the top ten search terms visitors are using and prioritize results and adjust the site so that even incorrect spelling pulls the desired search result
Heath Brady, Senior Open Systems Developer at Coleman.
Few brands in the United States are as well known and instantly recognized as those of The Coleman Company Inc, the world's leading manufacturer of camping and outdoor recreation products.
Coleman® manufactures and distributes a wide range of products for camping, outdoor recreation and leisuretime activities, available at sporting goods stores, mass merchants, hardware home centers, and food and drug stores across the United States, Canada and more than 100 other countries around the world. In 1914, the young company introduced the Coleman® Arc Lantern, the product that made it famous, and today Coleman continues to develop innovative new products and technologies that help people enjoy the great outdoors.
eCommerce & Brand Building on coleman.com
A brand as recognizable and trusted as Coleman® must be constantly renewed and reinforced. The company web site – http://www.coleman.com/ - is perhaps its most important asset in reinforcing brand credibility, not only in presenting product information, but in meeting and even exceeding customer expectations by providing rich product information and customer support.
The organization's culture is passionate about Coleman® products and customers, and has left no stone unturned to establish and maintain a stellar brand image. The company web sitewas set up as an online marketing presence with a double charter to provide pertinent information from a rich product catalogue as well as content including technical support, expert info, instruction manuals and dealer locations. Although coleman.com contains a shopping cart function for direct sales, the company's goal was not to become an online retailer nor compete with its major market retail customers who sell Coleman® products in brick-and-mortar stores. The overarching objective of the web site is to enhance Coleman's marketing and brand awareness, encouraging store traffic through superior information.
MondoSearch and Coleman's IT requirements
Coleman.com made the initial decision to install Mondosoft's site search solution, MondoSearch, because it met its infrastructure requirements, and fit right into the existing SQL server database environment. In addition, Coleman required a tool that worked as a database look-up, but one that would also index and return such unstructured content as press releases, checklists and product support questions, all of which are important to their customers.
Heath Brady, Senior Open Systems Developer, commented on the challenge:
When we thought about enhancing our site search, we wanted to make it very friendly for people coming to coleman.com. Before implementing MondoSearch, our search function was antiquated. It was designed to retrieve such static content as product names and product information without software intelligence or analytics. As a result control and customizations about how products were presented were limited. Consumers told us that finding information was so difficult that we became concerned about customer frustration and diminished loyalty.
Coleman Refines Search Results
Coleman integrated MondoSearch using the ActiveX Application Programming Interface to display each product with its image on the result page. Pages not related directly to a product are displayed as regular links. Presenting information in this way facilitates online comparison shopping as it provides people with the information they need to make their shopping decision.
According to Brady, Coleman® was able to rapidly and effectively deploy featurerich search and then see whether the solution was a success or not thanks to BehaviorTracking, Mondosoft's bundled search analytics application included with MondoSearch.
We have thousands of products on coleman.com. The Mondosoft search engine allows us to refine results so that our products and product lines have priority in search results. This delivers the information that we know people want, when they want it, efficiently and quickly
Using MondoSearch for Marketing Initiatives
Brady continues: "We have achieved our goal of understanding the behavior of people who visit our site through BehaviorTracking. For example, we can now see the top ten search terms visitors are using and prioritize results and adjust the site so that even incorrect spelling pulls the desired search result." Besides the basic search and categorization functions, Coleman® has optimized search results to drive marketing initiatives, such as special seasonal promotions. "This season we are promoting tents in a national TV advertising spot and in synchronous banners," commented Brady. "We have programmed MondoSearch so that if you type TENT it will bring up the banner that mimics the TV ad. When visitors recognize and click on the banner, they are brought to the TENTS section on the site."
BehaviorTracking gives Coleman® a daily report on the number of people who did click on the banner versus the number of visitors who did not, thereby providing an immediate gauge of the effectiveness of the TENTS banner and TV advertising campaign.
Search for Direct Marketing and Promotions Coleman also markets directly to consumers through email newsletters and email advertising, with promotions that provide an URL that drives the customer straight to the Coleman product or product section.
In addition, with the information provided through MondoSearch, InformationManager and BehaviorTracking, Coleman can correlate external events and sales spikes so the company can anticipate and meet demand. For example, earthquakes and other natural disasters spur lantern sales: between the time the disaster hits and sales spike, there is a surge in online search activity. People want to see what lanterns they could buy, the price point and where they can purchase one. Brady added that Mondosoft's InformationManager augments the consumer service line —the 800 number— by providing a higher level of product detail.
Indexing: the coleman.com Newsroom
Beyond searches on words, MondoSearch retrieves pdfs and images, which are valuable for coleman.com because the graphical content allows customers to identify the item through pictures before they purchase it in retail stores or online. Coleman.com also posts user manuals for many products on the site, and most of these are in pdf format.
"Because MondoSearch indexes pdfs, we did not have to change the way our information and images were classified," commented Brady. "The ability to handle images was important because the site serves consumers, and trade and mass media. The Newsroom is where we store high resolution images that the media need for their print articles. We receive lots of positive comments from reporters stating how impressed they are with how easy it is to find and obtain images and information."
MondoSearch as a Strategic Marketing Tool
Mondosoft's site search solution helps Coleman meet its primary objective for coleman.com: provide an online marketing tool that promotes the Coleman® brand, in complement with its overall marketing strategy and leveraging its advertising campaigns. Mondosoft enables Coleman to incorporate continuous testing, feedback and improvement cycles into its ongoing business processes towards the goal of enhancing the consumer experience.
Contact Info
Coleman Inc.
www.coleman.com
P.O. Box 2931
Wichita, KS 67201
800 835 3278