The international coffee giant brewed up a new digital strategy

Strauss Coffee blends, roasts, and grinds high-quality beans into coffee experiences for millions of coffee drinkers worldwide. A subsidiary of the Israeli food manufacturer Strauss Group, Strauss Coffee is a pure play coffee company boasting more than 20 brands in seven different territories. As one of the top ten coffee companies in the world, Strauss knew that to stay ahead of the competition, they needed a new digital strategy. “We decided to go direct-to-consumer, and engage directly with our customers,” said Alon Raz, VP of eCommerce for Strauss Coffee.

This would be a major undertaking, and for Raz, would involve a few late night espresso macchiatos. “We are based in Amsterdam, but we have [operations] in Brazil, Russia, Israel, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine,” he said. “How do we win in each territory?” Strauss customers have a lot of other options, and they’re used to buying Strauss coffee products in-store, not online. Strauss needed to create a distinct value proposition in each country, to drive consumers online. “We needed a single development platform that could be deployed in multiple countries. We needed a solution architecture that was flexible enough and able to scale.” They needed Magento Commerce.

Subscription was the answer.

Strauss started their project in the summer of 2016. “We wanted to roll out this eCommerce operation and make it an important sales channel within the company,” said Raz. The main selling point of Magento was that it allowed the company to roll out individual stores in multiple countries, and play to consumer needs in each country. For example, in Israel, consumers like to buy in bulk, so their Elite Coffee site displays a carousel with a ‘quick buy’ button for mix & match up to 360 coffee capsules.

In Romania, customers care about the source of their coffee. On the Beanz Café site, customers shop by clicking on a photograph of their favorite coffee farmer, like Fabienne from Congo. They can learn about how female coffee factory workers join the Rebuild Women’s Hope program, that offers support and boosts their self-confidence. “We try to find the right angle in each country to drive the consumer to action,” said Raz. Meanwhile, a design agency tailored the user experience for each country.

The biggest part of the project was developing a subscription service. Strauss coffee launched the program first in Romania, creating a subscription engine, that allows customers to sign up for monthly coffee deliveries. “They don’t even need to come back to the store,” said Raz. “Our aim is to provide an affordable and quality cup of coffee at the touch of a button, once.” The subscription tool allows customers to choose delivery on a specific date. They can also cancel, freeze, and change their order, add a different mix of products, or increase the number of coffee products they’ve subscribed to. By making repeat purchases automated, Strauss coffee converted one time users into loyal customers.

Strauss coffee integrated Salesforce Marketing Cloud into the platform, linked into Google Analytics, so their media agency has full visibility into their stores, and can apply retargeting tools. “We integrated Magento Business Intelligence (MBI), for a unified view across all these data sources to get a complete picture into how the business is doing,” said Raz. “We have a set of KPIs for that. A day in the life of an eCommerce manager comprises of looking at the traffic, and figuring out how to convert traffic into shoppers. The most challenging part is loyalty. How to transform one-time shoppers to regular buyers. That’s at the forefront of our strategy. On a daily basis we have a set of 25 to 30 KPIs we look at, on a single dashboard. We also look at imported data from Google Analytics and Facebook, and we analyze media expenditure on a daily basis.”

Economy of scale.

Strauss Coffee wanted to grow their eCommerce business, but also simplify it. With Magento Commerce, they also added an omnichannel component. With their Beanz brand, they drive customers from their bricks-and-mortar and pop-up stores to their eCommerce site. Consumers can subscribe in store to regular coffee deliveries, as the Magento store frontend is open to sales reps using an iPad. “It took us several months to develop a subscription service,” said Raz, “but the economy of scale is coming in.” Overall, Strauss Coffee with the results from the new platform.

“In most cases we created a site from scratch,” said Raz. “In one example, Elite Coffee, we switched from a local solution to the Magento Commerce platform. Very quickly we doubled mobile ordering transactions. Our goal completion went up 50 percent, not only for conversions, but a bunch of actions, like adding a product to a basket. Customers are engaging more. There was a 60 percent increase in pages per session. Duration time also went up. There was significant growth when we switched to the platform.” For Strauss Coffee, Magento was the solution for a truly global digital strategy, and rolling out new stores in different geographies is easy. “We’re still in the midst of our project,” said Raz. “We are growing our business every year.”