Eurokangas: 38,52% Improvement in Purchase Journey with Reviews

Eurokangas is a Finnish company that sells textiles and sewing equipment to consumers. Since 2017, it has developed its online shop alongside its brick-and-mortar stores. The latest addition to the online store has been adding sewing services where anyone can order custom-made curtains made from a fabric of their choosing – and without having to leave the comfort of their own home. Eurokangas has used its excellent customer reviews gathered with Trustmary for both further developing and then marketing the new service.

Eurokangas is one of Finland’s most well-known brands among handicrafters. In addition to having an extensive online shop, the company has 30 brick-and-mortar locations all over Finland. The online store features 80.000 different products annually.

The product volume creates a lot of challenges for collecting and showcasing reviews.

The online store is used as a catalog where customers can check the availability of products in a specific brick-and-mortar store. In addition to being used to check product availability, one can order services online, such as custom-made curtains from any fabric of their choosing.

Over the years, Eurokangas has established itself in the minds of Finnish consumers as a high-quality vendor. Therefore, the company wanted to measure its customer experience more precisely and use the customer feedback on its website to increase the trust and likelihood of placing an order online.

Eurokangas chose a European Trustmary to execute the surveys as well as to showcase the feedback on the website with widgets. Antti Voutilainen is the head of eCommerce at Eurokangas, and he tells how he and his eCommerce team as well as the marketing team use Trustmary.

300 New Reviews on Website – Monthly

Before starting to use Trustmary, Voutilainen did detailed research on the best way to collect product reviews and add them to the website. Eurokangas has a huge product volume: Their e-commerce store has 80.000 different products on an annual level and some products might be available for one season.

Voutilainen noticed that collecting product reviews is futile and decided to focus on measuring the quality of service and highlighting that on the website.

– We wanted to gather customer feedback on our service and add it to our website in a handy way. At the same time, we want to offer our staff insights into how well our customers think our online store functions, Voutilainen describes.

Voutilainen has an extensive background in developing e-commerce and online stores as he has dealt with them in one way or another during his whole career.

At Eurokangas, it is his responsibility to develop the online store and to reach the sales goals. The company plans to expand its services to international markets, especially in terms of offering sewing services. 

– There is broad demand for the expertise of our drapery seamstresses and the ease of the service we offer. We have already recognized the United Kingdom as a possible market, Voutilainen says.

Before opening a new market, the company tests how its services work and how the purchase journey functions in a domestic market.

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Automated Process for Collecting and Adding Reviews

– We automatically send a feedback survey two weeks after the purchase to everyone who orders from our e-commerce store. We get around 300 new reviews monthly, and the reviews are long. They’re sometimes even too long to be added to our website, Voutilainen describes.

In addition to getting hundreds of reviews monthly, Voutilainen has been surprised to learn that customers review their brick-and-mortar stores spontaneously on Google.

– Thousands of people write us Google reviews. Our Google reviews are automatically imported to Trustmary so we can go over them weekly. We can send the reviews then individually to each brick-and-mortar store, Voutilainen goes on.

Voutilainen says that the employees working in the stores appreciate that the great reviews they get are being noticed. Additionally, any possible negative comments help each store improve its level of customer service to be even better next time. 

Eurokangas has listed the address and contact information of each brick-and-mortar store on its website.

With Trustmary, they’ve added a contact form for each of the locations that features customer reviews given to that store. They function as social proof and encourage customers to get in touch. 

Validating New Products before Developing

In addition to the traditional customer reviews, Voutilainen and his team also want to let their customers tell their opinion on new products and services that are being developed.

– Our team or the company might have a great idea about what our customers might want. Before we start developing, we want to validate that it is something customers actually need, Voutilainen says. 

For this purpose, Eurokangas has created a Trustmary popup widget to reach their target audience directly from its website and without burdening existing customers with survey emails. 

– Our website gets a ton of traffic daily, so it’s an excellent opportunity to reach our target audience. By using popups, we can validate which products or services website visitors are interested in, Voutilainen explains. 

Marketing New Services with Reviews

When Eurokangas launched its new service, it decided to use social proof in its marketing.

– Anyone can order custom-made curtains from our sewing service. Because the product is made using the measurements sent in by the customers, the same return policies do not apply to them as they do with other products. This was initially a huge hindrance to buying, Voutilainen clarifies.

As Eurokangas is known for its stellar customer service, it decided to try whether highlighting its great service on the sewing service landing page could improve trust and convince to place an order online. 

– As soon as we added a review widget to the top of the order page, we saw an immediate boost in how people went through the whole ordering process. It had a huge impact on the potential customers when they could see that others had successfully ordered custom-made curtains online, he goes on. 

The purchase journey experienced a boost of 38,52% when Eurokangas added the review widget to the start of it.

Antti Voutilainen

Frictionless Purchase Journey with Customer Surveys

Eurokangas uses advanced technology to measure their website traffic and conversions. The company can deduct many things from looking at the data and analyzing it. Voutilainen highlights that any deductions made based solely on the numeric data are just guesses.

That is why Eurokangas implemented many customer surveys in different stages when they initially validated their purchase journey.

– At one point, we had a customer survey on our thank you- page to validate the ease of the customer journey. When the feedback was mostly positive, we took the survey away to stop burdening our buyers, Voutilainen says. 

Voutilainen and his team aim to optimize the purchase experience to be as effortless as possible at each turn. The same mentality applies to collecting customer feedback.

–  We don’t even send out a reminder to the ones that have not answered our customer feedback survey to not burden the buyers too much. By using customer surveys strategically at different points of the customer journey, we can validate the quality of our service and validate that our processes work, he continues.

Voutilainen highlights that in addition to being data-driven, the company places of lot of value in customer reviews. If he would only look at the numbers, he would never know why someone left the items in the cart, but did not go through with the purchase.

–  By using Trustmary, we have been able to kind of get inside the customers’ heads. We can use the insights we get from the customer reviews and feedback to improve our business, Voutilainen summarizes. 

Cooperation Worth Continuing 

Eurokangas uses Trustmary to manage the huge mass of reviews and customer feedback. The company uses an easy tagging system within Trustmary so it can easily direct the right type of reviews to the right services and locations when it publishes the reviews on its website. 

Marika Patronen is one of Trustmary’s users and finds it easy to use the software as well as the review tagging system to sort reviews for the website.

She also finds the positive reviews to be motivating.

In addition to being happy with the ease of use, Voutilainen has been satisfied with the service he has received from Trustmary.

– We always get a response if we have something on our minds. We use the popup widget in a unique way, and wanted a few changes to be done to it. Trustmary was able to get that done in a fast schedule, Voutilainen thanks. 

Trustmary is worth more than just the boost in conversion rates.

– If I’m having a bad day, I can always cheer myself up by reading the great customer feedback and reviews we get, Voutilainen laughs.

– The biggest benefit from using Trustmary is that we can better develop our own services and products. We can stop guessing what our customers might think, and can make decisions based on comparing customer feedback and data from Analytics, he summarizes.

Features in Use 

• Feedback form
• Review widget on website
• Popup widget
• Reporting
• Automations

Benefits Using Trustmary

• 38,52% increase in conversions from sewing service to fill in contact information
• Easy review content management by tagging
• Validating the need for a new product or service before developing
• High-quality and long customer feedback and reviews
• 300 new reviews monthly
• Adding Google reviews from each brick-and-mortar store to website
• Reporting reviews to each brick-and-mortar store

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