Peugeot Saveurs finds the recipe for e-commerce performance

A fresh start with Synolia & Magento

It all began in early 2020, when Peugeot Saveurs contacted Synolia to redefine its digital strategy and take over its existing Magento platform. For anyone who loves cooking, Peugeot is an iconic name in French gastronomy. Its famous pepper and coffee mills are part of the picture of every accomplished cook who knows the value of good tools in the kitchen!

Needless to say, when Xavier Emonin, the group’s Digital Director, reached out to Synolia to give fresh momentum to its e-commerce strategy, our teams sprang into action right away. Next stop: Quingey, in the Doubs department, where the company is headquartered.

The project goal: develop and optimize a sales channel whose potential had not yet been fully tapped. More specifically: increase the visibility of the brand and its products, and put in place an effective strategy to drive sales by delivering flawless service and a flawless brand experience.

A team effort!

To carry out this mission, Synolia brought in its strategic partner Empirik, which specializes in SEO/SEM and data. But before going into the details of the project, a quick word on how Synolia approaches its customers’ challenges: we start from the principle that you cannot claim to be good at everything, or you end up being bad… everywhere! So when it comes to pushing acquisition levers to their full potential, in this case for a high-value SEO/SEM mission, it makes sense to bring in a true specialist to reinforce the e-commerce consulting and development skills already on the team.

Empirik is a digital marketing consultancy specializing in search and data. Its CEO, Lionel Cherpin, has worked with Synolia for many years. Like Synolia’s teams, Empirik’s people are passionate about their craft and the challenges that come with it.

Both companies share the same belief in deep specialization, and it shows in their clients’ projects. This one was a genuine three-way effort between Synolia, Empirik, and Peugeot Saveurs. And like any ambitious project, it needed someone at the controls. Synolia took on the role of conductor and coordinated all the project stakeholders.

Redefining the online strategy

Over the course of a year, the teams worked hard together! The mission was carried out in close collaboration with the digital department, the sales department, and the marketing and communications teams. As you will see later, communication and collaboration were essential.

Analyzing the situation and making surgical strikes

First, a technical audit of the platform was carried out, followed by an SEO/SEM performance audit. This made it possible to define a strategy and a roadmap for the future. The point was not to do development… just for the sake of doing development.

“On many e-commerce projects, merchants, or their e-commerce service providers, are far too often focused on building as many things as possible, convinced that adding services will bring a proportional increase in revenue! The result is very often the opposite.

Instead of performance, they end up with an unstable platform whose technical and functional debt keeps growing until it becomes unbearable. You then have to step back and look at the key issues to address, as well as the overall stability of the platform, before improving it. It is a matter of clear-sightedness, which does not stop you from having strong ambitions,” explains Pascal Brunel, head of the e-business practice at Synolia.

At this stage of the project, Synolia opted for surgical strikes! First, an upgrade of the platform, addressing the most sensitive performance and security issues. No major development projects here, but rather rebuilding solid foundations to support future enhancements…

Together, the teams worked in particular on:

• Better flow orchestration, with fixes to certain processes, especially around transactions, to remove the teams’ pain points.
• Optimized delivery methods that better match customer expectations.
• Securing the areas that have a direct impact on the business.

In short, a phase of stabilization, fine-tuning, and optimization that delivered a more efficient, more stable platform.

In parallel, a thorough optimization of paid search and display campaign management and SEO positioning was carried out with Empirik. Monitoring tools were also set up around clearly defined goals (such as ranking first for the French query “moulin sel poivre”). All of this was backed by a genuine content creation policy (videos, inspirational content) and an advanced media strategy (paid search, display, Smart Shopping…).

From the outset, the business objective was ambitious: maintain and strengthen the brand’s positioning on its core terms, while also capturing traffic from more generic, product-oriented searches to generate revenue. So what are the results of this strategy one year after work began?

A favorable context

Let’s be honest: the health crisis, which led to lockdowns in France and many other countries, hurt business across the board. But there is no doubt that online spending on home products, and especially anything related to cooking and the culinary experience, grew strongly in 2020. Once again, iconic products like Peugeot’s, which have always attracted genuine interest, saw growing enthusiasm during this period. The numbers speak for themselves.

According to LSA-CONSO, online spending in this category grew 46% over March, April, and May 2020 compared with the previous year!

An exceptional performance nonetheless

So some growth was only to be expected. Even so, Peugeot Saveurs’ numbers literally shattered the trends in 2020. The results are unmistakable:

The number of sessions rose sharply! And that is nothing compared with transactions, which jumped 226%, while revenue grew 210% compared with the same period a year earlier! The kind of numbers every brand dreams of!

A clear path for e-commerce growth

Building on these results, the synergy between the different players grew stronger throughout the project. Peugeot Saveurs has validated a winning strategy, so the company can confidently continue to grow its e-commerce business. Everyone at the company is now committed to keeping up this momentum in France and internationally.

“The Peugeot Saveurs project clearly illustrates how interdependent the 3 pillars of the e-commerce value chain are: a rich product offering backed by strong brand awareness, a technical platform focused on the quality of the customer experience, and targeted acquisition campaigns. 2020 allowed us to lay the e-commerce foundations in a favorable market. Our 2021 goal for this brand is to build on this exceptional year with an even more ROI-driven approach to existing levers, through advanced use of data and by testing new acquisition campaigns. Finally, we will roll out an international action plan that draws on the lessons learned in the French market while taking into account the specific consumer behaviors of each country,” says Lionel Cherpin, Consulting Director & CEO of Empirik.

Succeeding in e-commerce is not about a miracle recipe built on the “Ultimate” service or “THE” solution that will make revenue skyrocket. Performance rests on fundamentals, just like every other sales channel. Those fundamentals are platform stability and fewer friction points in the user experience, whether for the “customer” user on the site or the “operator” user of the Magento e-commerce platform, who needs reliable, high-performing tools to run the business.

Finally, the key to success is open and effective collaboration with the client’s business teams and the various service providers working on the project. That means sharing strategic information in complete trust, the only way to define an effective shared strategy!