How Canon USA boosted conversion rates by 150%.

A snapshot of digital transformation

For nearly a century, Canon has been known worldwide for gifting generations of image-makers with ways to capture memory and explore imagination. Fittingly, the global imaging company’s rising star Canon USA has made its own innovative mark. In the space of just a few years, they’ve contributed extraordinary growth to the Canon name — a 25% increase in mobile traffic, a 20% reduction in bounce rate, and a 150% growth in conversion rate year over year. And they’ve done all this while delivering an award-winning approach to customer experience and making it to the top 10 of Newsweek’s “Best Online Shops 2023” in the consumer electronics category.

But Canon USA’s stratospheric rise didn’t happen overnight. Theirs is a hard-won story of transformation — and Michael Lebron, Senior Director and Head of Front Office Applications, and Betty Ana Giossi, Canon’s Director of Social Media and Web Operations for the Corporate Communications Division, were there for it all.

A reckoning and a vision

In 2017, the two saw an urgent need. As Canon USA had organically added products and business units over the years, their collection of online commerce offerings and architecture had grown in complexity. This complexity created a host of problems from scalability roadblocks to SEO problems to device and accessibility glitches. A confusing web presence across disconnected marketing and commerce sites affected customer confidence, halted growth, and stalled topline sales.

“The issues were significant and wide-ranging. We were dealing with site performance, reliability, and functional issues on sites that were 15 years old and had been modified quite heavily to meet the functional requirements of our business units,” Lebron says. “The sites caused confusion for our customers because we had two sites with the exact same product information — the marketing site and the commerce site. Visitors would sometimes wonder if they were even on an official Canon site.”

The web experience also needed upgrades to be more user-friendly, and to improve customer satisfaction and confidence — the site had to reflect a brand that could appeal to a diverse, global audience for generations to come. With all these targets to hit, Giossi and Lebron were determined to redesign the entire online experience. With equal parts insight, technology, and tenacity, they implemented a powerful, new OneWeb approach built on an integrated tech stack, led by Adobe Experience Manager Sites, Adobe Experience Manager Assets, and Adobe Commerce.

“Ultimately, our goal is to let the website be a home where people can come and engage — the place where we tell our story,” Giossi says.

Grounding change in trust

Giossi and Lebron took inventory of their customer and business needs from every angle, starting with a focus on customer experience. “We started from a clean slate,” says Lebron. “We asked ourselves what our customers look like today, what the message is that we’re trying to deliver, and what the user journeys are that we need to consider.”

The pair also took a close look at how internal processes were functioning and got to work removing silos, connecting marketing and campaign teams, auditing content, aligning branding, and building an optimized, unified site experience. Giossi and her team looked at tens of thousands of image repositories that were stored anywhere from jump and hard drives to an archaic asset management system. Access was often restricted to these sources, and content that was siloed by different business verticals was hard to review. “That initial content audit wasn’t an easy task,” says Giossi.

As they re-engineered processes and implemented new initiatives, Giossi and Lebron knew change needed to be grounded in trust to gain traction. The two encouraged teams to share business needs, and to mentor and coach one another. “Putting in the work to connect teams at the onset of the project was one the best and also one of the most difficult components of this project. We did a lot of trust falling with each other to create those strong interpersonal relationships,” says Giossi. This foundational groundwork ended up being pivotal. “Our connections helped move us closer and closer to our North Star and were really the key to our success.”

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A scalable solution

The company needed a powerful, integrated solution designed to handle the scope of their digital transformation goals. The solution had to merge separate marketing and commerce sites, optimize SEO and organic traffic, and make finding products and services easy for customers. “It also needed to streamline and organize content and asset management for our marketing teams, let us personalize multichannel customer experiences, and grow with us into the future,” Lebron says.

To address these needs, the team chose Experience Manager Sites and Experience Manager Assets to manage their storefront, content, and digital assets. “Adobe Experience Manager was seen as a leader, a platform with robust features, scalability, and technical performance — and it was also very user-friendly compared with other alternatives,” says Lebron.

They then added Adobe Commerce to the stack, enabling the crucial integrations with Experience Manager the team was looking for. The combination solved all the site, content, and experience issues Canon was wrestling with by merging their separate marketing and commerce sites, and creating a seamless storefront experience.

The new stack allows each business team to work with the tool they know best — the marketing team can work in the CMS while merchandisers work in the ecommerce tool, which exist side-by-side throughout the site. For example, on product detail pages, merchandise details such as pricing and specs come from the ecommerce tool, while the CMS powers the marketing content.

This solution also provided a capacity for rapid development and configurability, and answered their ecommerce needs for sustainable, reliable, and scalable growth. “Importantly, it also offered longevity — it gave us a foundation for growth of capabilities like live commerce and marketplace sites,” Lebron says.

The new, integrated stack was a game-changer for the team, providing a cascade of big wins. It allowed them to expand their product catalog and highlight those products on their site for direct sales, in addition to amplifying SEO and lead generation for products not sold directly to consumers. These changes allowed them to increase cross-sell opportunity as well as support additional business units and industries on their newly-consolidated site. Adding more payment options such as PayPal, Google Pay, and Venmo made site purchases far more convenient for customers, accelerating conversion rates.

“Integration of Commerce helped us completely revamp user experience,” says Lebron. “From compressed page load times to increased site traffic to significant improvements in both web and mobile performance, Adobe Commerce has made a dramatic difference — it’s even helped improve our SEO and accessibility scores.”

Implementation of the integrated Adobe solution boosted efficiency gains across the organization. “The one commodity none of us have enough of is time, and time savings is really critical for us. Time to market is vital, it lets us stay ahead of the competition,” says Lebron.

Wins for customers

These solutions have also spelled big wins for customers. The team built seamless, accessible web experiences for their diverse customer base into the DNA of their new site. Whether looking for a point-and-shoot camera or professional broadcasting equipment, they made sure every customer — regardless of disability or device used — could easily find them. “In fact, we now have the highest score of accessibility ever since our journey of being on the web for Canon,” Lebron says.

Bringing Adobe Commerce and Experience Manager together have helped Canon USA power a far more personalized customer journey. Lebron says niche customers — such as professional night photographers or wedding photographers — can now easily and quickly find the products they’re interested in. They’ll be dynamically directed to related products, accessories, and content that will help them solve business needs and increase the chance of a purchase. “It’s all about personalization — getting the customers to the content that's most relevant to them, in their preferred channel.”

Digital transformation has yielded other welcome benefits. Canon USA’s tech stack supports a “live commerce” experience where customers can go from a livestream event directly to the checkout process. The solution also delivers impressive efficiency gains — consolidation has resulted in a site that’s over 50% faster, and far easier to navigate without help. “All this has translated into an impressive reduction in service and support calls, as well as decreased the amount of issues and concerns that we were handling through social media,” says Giossi.

Canon USA’s call center reps now spend more time selling products than they do helping people navigate the commerce site. On high-stakes shopping days, the gains have been incredible — Canon USA has seen a 73% increase in sales growth year over year on holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. “We’ve got these amazing statistics from our call center now that show this shift, and it’s due to the ease of the site experience,” says Lebron.

Crafting the creative Canon story

Telling a powerful, cohesive Canon story across channels was top of mind for the team as they refined their roadmap.

Giossi built templates to establish Canon’s look and feel across all their different business verticals to help marketing teams easily showcase that brand identity. Now when teams go in to utilize the tools and assets, they can sync with Canon’s consistent messaging and execute their projects quickly. “It’s turned our marketing team’s world’s upside down — in a good way,” Giossi says.

A centralized repository gave teams fast, searchable access to engaging imagery. “Visual impact is one of the most important components to our content strategy,” says Giossi. “Everyone is moving quickly through content. You have to be able to catch their attention, catch their eye. Visualization can be the thing that helps a customer through their purchasing journey.”

Streamlined imagery and asset management helped Canon USA take their messaging to a new level. But Giossi and Lebron agree that one of the biggest rewards digital transformation gave their teams was the gift of creativity. “Before we used Experience Manager Sites and Assets, there was a barrier to entry for creators from a technical perspective — content creators had to rely on someone with technical expertise to post anything,” says Lebron. “But Experience Manager Sites and Assets have changed all that. It was really developed with the content creator in mind. Betty’s team, the marketers with a creative mindset, could post quickly because that technical bottleneck had been removed. They can now spend their time reaching even higher levels of creativity.”

“Creative freedom has been one of the best outcomes of using the Experience Manager tools. We’re able to build high-impact stories quickly, and share them across any of our campaigns and channels,” Giossi says.

The future of community

Giossi and Lebron have a lot to be proud of. In addition to laying the groundwork for record-breaking business wins, their OneWeb approach helped place Canon USA among the top 10 of Newsweek’s “Best Online Shops 2023” in the consumer electronics category.

And they’re not done. The Canon USA team has their eye on bright horizons and their customers. “We want to re-connect not only with our loyal customers, but with our up-and-coming customers — Gen Z, the Alpha generation,” Giossi says. “The hope is that they’re going to look and see what the previous generations have come to love about the Canon brand, and will want to begin to build new memories with us.”