     |
|
|
Industry: Office & Stationary Solution: Dynamic Imaging, Visual Configurators  Challenges:
Holiday Cards Unlimited is one of the forerunners in using the Internet to offer professionally printed, high-quality greeting cards to Fortune 500 companies, small to mid-size businesses, and individuals across the country. Carrying an extensive product line with hundreds of cards to meet everyone’s needs, Holiday Cards Unlimited provides an efficient way to select and customize cards online, and have them delivered directly to one’s doorstep as quickly as possible. Best Practices: The buying, sending, and exchanging of holiday cards is a long-lived tradition that will continue on despite economic downturns, technological advances, or even cultural differences. With more than 1.8 billion cards exchanged during the December holidays alone, it's important for a merchandiser of holiday cards to differentiate its offerings from competitors. Holiday Cards Unlimited has sought to do just that. After a thorough review of the rich media landscape, Holiday Cards Unlimited selected Adobe Scene7 for its robustness and scalability. “We were looking for an 'easy', cost-effective solution to help accomplish our goals. We wanted to make sure we were working with a very sophisticated solution that could meet the needs most critical to our business operations—especially in the area of online proofs—and could offer operational efficiencies that would allow us to add further enhancements down the road,” said Tim Christopoulos, Holiday Cards Unlimited. "Scene7 matched well. As a SaaS offering, Scene7 met our immediate goals of increasing website conversions and sales, lifting customer satisfaction, reducing IT expenses, and improving efficiency within our customer care center." Holiday Cards Unlimited is able to provide its customers with a greater feel for the quality of its greeting cards by leveraging Adobe Scene7 to show card characteristics such as the texture of the paper—whether it is embossed or has foil inks—and color options. The Scene7 platform dynamically generates and delivers all website content on demand using a single, high-resolution master image. The solution also offers data-driven templates that combine true-type fonts, images and graphics with layer effects for online personalization and customization. This makes it possible for Holiday Cards Unlimited to present customers with an online preview (or proof) of the personalized components of their selected greeting card, enabling them to see their font choices for custom verses, greetings, closings, and return address imprinting, and to try different color inks and wording, and see the changes in real time. With thirteen different fonts and eight different colors to choose from, each and every card on the site can be personalized in some fashion. Given that there are nearly 1,000 products available on the website now, the customization options are nearly limitless. This just makes the online proof even more invaluable to shoppers—giving them the visual confirmation needed to feel more secure about their final product at the time of ordering, which results in greater sales and conversions. Since most card competitors offer inferior or non-existent previews, showing accurate online previews has immediately helped to differentiate Holiday Cards Unlimited. Additionally, because of Scene7’s unique ability to dynamically scale all rich media viewing across all products on the site, Holiday Cards Unlimited has reduced IT expenses, timeframes required, and staff needed to manage a whole range of image sizes and types used across various properties. Customers are shown a range of images throughout the purchase process (for example, on the category and product pages, in the shopping bag, and during checkout), which reminds them of their card choices and leads to greater buyer confidence as they are reassured that their needs have been met. The use of images is also carried through to email communications, used during the pre-sales process, within e-newsletters, inside order confirmations, and in replying to questions on an ordered product. Before Scene7, Holiday Cards Unlimited used individual image files, which was tedious, time consuming, and expensive. For preview images, the company used a custom application, but it was limited and a lot of code had to be created to make and visually display changes. Using Scene7 has improved this process dramatically by enabling the company to manage multiple product images based on a single, high-resolution image and by making it simple to resize and apply various attributes to images simply by changing parameters in the URL, i.e. drop shadows, fonts, and text size. “While it’s known that Scene7 partners with a long list of very large and nationally known e-tailers, the solution, pricing, and available support has also proven to easily accommodate smaller businesses such as ours,” said Christopoulos. “We were unwilling to take the business and development risk in working with what we saw as lower tiered solutions from other companies.” With Scene7 on board, Holiday Cards Unlimited has been able to reduce the expenses associated with image management, which has ultimately ensured the launch of a laundry list of desired image projects, and which may not have been possible to pursue with a less scalable or higher cost solution. The Scene7 solution has also been instrumental in assisting Holiday Cards Unlimited’s staff internally by serving a quick view of customers’ order details, which has proven useful for instantly visualizing any order on the fly. Staff can see the exact personalized images that a customer has viewed on the website, which improves communication with shoppers and again adds a layer of confidence to the transaction. “We saw Scene7 as a solution that would allow for us to quickly solve our initial image needs, while giving us the ability to implement additional enhancements over time,” said Christopoulos. “We are fully deployed with many key initiatives, but are in the process of adding further functionality and enhancements. For example, we are planning to incorporate zoom and are in the process of refining our templating for even more accurate previewing that will allow us to use these generated images as a base for our near-term goal of being able to have print ready images.” Results After Integrating Scene7:
Other business benefit(s) as a result of integrating Scene7:
|
