Zalando
Multinational Consumer Fashion Site + App
I was the team lead, content/editor in chief with Zalando, Europe’s largest e-commerce fashion company, with products in 17 countries and 14,000 employees. I managed an international team of 25+, including 7 direct manager-level reports. I was tasked with increasing the quality and visibility of Zalando’s content offerings and improving the end-to-end user experience, from customer inspiration to conversion to purchase.
Challenges:
To emphasize the importance of and advocate for content as part of Zalando’s product offerings by increasing communication amongst Zalando’s departments (e.g., creative, marketing, PR, sales, social).
To improve communication amongst the Creative Team to better streamline the content creation and production process.
To analyze the range of Zalando’s content types and decide what to keep, what to cut and what to change.
To figure out ways to best surface the content on the Zalando site and app and measure its success.
Solution:
Created a roadshow and set up one-on-ones with other Team Leads to introduce the Content Team, discuss collaborations on future projects and begin processes for sharing knowledge going forward.
Scheduled weekly one-on-ones with each member of my team to discuss successes, challenges and solutions, as well as made myself available for impromptu meetings as needed. I also streamlined the weekly content meeting to make it more inclusive and give everyone a chance to discuss their projects and weigh in on others’ projects. (We also had a daily standup.)
Streamlined the content analytics reports and shared them with the content team on a regular basis. This way, we could respond quickly to create more content if needed and pull back if it wasn’t working. This included creation of a more flexible content calendar.
Performed a content review, which included input from team members, plus metrics and user testing, to see users’ response to current content and decide how to move forward. This resulted in:
Cutting content types that didn’t perform as well.
Highlighting higher-performing content (e.g., Get the Look, How To).
Optimizing content that had traffic but a high bounce rate, such as videos, which we shortened and focused, saving time and costs.
Results:
Pageviews, unique users and average time on page all showed healthy increases – for instance, from 2.7 million monthly pageviews for women’s content up to 4 million.
We increased the number of entry points to the content throughout the site and app.
The Content Team felt more empowered to openly discuss ideas and to take responsibility for their individual work.
Other teams within the company became more aware of content, and team representatives were increasingly invited to collaborate as stakeholders on cross-functional projects.