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Case study

Empire Bespoke Foods

Empire Bespoke Foods (EBF) are a leading importer, distributor and brand builder of products sourced worldwide and offered to UK and Europe. EBF have a shared passion and knowledge of the grocery and speciality food sector, with over 50 years combined expertise in sourcing brands from the USA, Europe and Asia.

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The Brief

Build a new site to deliver EBF’s first foray into secure online ordering from EBF’s large food catalogue. Product data and promotions are regularly updated, so an easy means to synchronise all product data, promotions and pricing from EBF’s back-office Sage solution was required.

Late 2022 Announcement - We have just completed a project to extend the existing site by fully integrating Sage product, stock, order and customer data and enhancing the e-commerce functionality into the site - read on further down the page!

Project Capabilities

The key to the success of this project related to:

  • Producing a highly detailed Statement of Work for the project following a consultation session with all key stakeholders at EBF
  • Assisting in defining a method and formalising EBF's product data (over 20,000 lines) from Sage and importing these data into our AbsolutelyInteractive CMS
  • EBF had recently undertaken an acquisition of another business so this meant designing the new site by combining two existing brands
  • Delivering a full email marketing and marketing automation solution that allows customer journeys to handle welcome and onboarding campaigns, abandoned basket, lead scoring and seasonal promotions
  • Designing and building:
    • Highly configurable landing pages
    • Advanced blog with social integration and automated e-newsletters (content is auto-populated from the blog)
    • Fully content managed promotions based on product ranges, brands and SKUs
    • Content managed product image overlays to show product promotions, out of stock items, etc

Insightful Analysis and Metrics

Our AbsolutelyInteractive CMS provides core CMS, Blog, Email Marketing and most importantly advanced Marketing Automation (MA) capabilities.

The MA function not only provides full customer journey automation but also massively important insights as to how the site is being used and the effectiveness of all promotions.

The example on the left shows the analysis of one user's activities - this level of insight is available for all known users and provides essential information for optimisation of content and improving conversion ratios.

Promotions

Being able to manage promotions within our CMS is one of our solutions greatest assets for EBF.

Within AbsolutelyInteractive EBF staff can setup:

  • Fixed price production reductions for any time period on any brand, product range and/or individual SKUs
  • Percentage reduction for any time period across any brand, product range and/or individual SKUs
  • Overlay their own images that appear for any promotions available
  • Add Calls to Action (CTA) across the home page or brand pages to encourage sales
  • Relate any promotional product to any other in the same or different promotion using simple dropdowns within the CMS - to increase basket sizes and revenue

2022 Update

In the last quarter of 2022, we went live with a large project to fully integrate the EBF eCommerce solution with their new Sage back-office system, allowing products, inventory, CRM data to be queried/synchronised by our AI site from Sage and for live  orders to be injected directly into SAGE.

Here are some highlights:

  •  Pricing, stock and other data are synchronised between AI and Sage on a nightly basis and, in some cases, a live sync ensures that inventory levels remains accurate at the point of purchase. Out of stock items may not be purchased but, where possible, alternative products are displayed for the user
  •  Extra rich content product data are retained and managed in AI to enhance the products presented to users
  •  Using Sage as the master data set, Contact/Account data are synchronised between Sage and AI to maintain the accuracy of contact data in both systems. Some existing data remains unique in the AI database for contacts, such as encrypted passwords
  •  To ensure a simple and effective process for EBF staff dealing with new orders, we developed the ability to transfer new orders directly into Sage from the site, thus bypassing all of the manual phases previously undertaken
  •  We designed and developed a more user friendly and easy to use product search to accommodate the growing product categories, brands, regions and options EBF offer their customers.
  •  A new Favourites feature gives users the option to add any product to their favourite list directly from the product listing and details pages