Wordsmith empowers premier big-box retailer, Wehkamp, to scale their efforts by automating product listings written in Dutch.
- Over 300,000 narratives generated
- Increased website traffic and SEO ranking
Wordsmith empowers premier big-box retailer, Wehkamp, to scale their efforts by automating product listings written in Dutch.
Wehkamp | Industry: Retail
Wehkamp is a large online department store in the Netherlands. The company has more than 2.7 million regular customers and more than 500,000 visitors a day, and it ships more than 11 million packages a year. Its product assortment consists of more than 400,000 different items spanning some 2,000 brands, mainly in the categories of fashion, living, beauty and baby/children. Wehkamp sells large international brands, local brands, small brands and exclusive brands, and produces many private label collections. The company believes in cleverly combining fashion and lifestyle with online technology and a great shopping experience to offer its customers and partners a relevant and compelling retail platform. More than 50 percent of its customers now shop on their mobile devices, mainly via the Wehkamp app. Any stock item can be ordered today, shipped free of charge tomorrow and returned free of charge. Wehkamp’s mission is simple: to make the lives of all families in the Netherlands easier and more beautiful. For more information, please visit www.wehkamp.nl.
As Wehkamp grew their product offering, their needs for clear and concise product descriptions, with a strategic focus on SEO, grew with them. In 2018, Wehkamp saw opportunity in expanding their product offering past clothing and accessories. The challenge came with the amount of content required to write web copy for each new product. Onboarding new writers and content specialists was out of the question, as both options were too expensive and time-consuming.
The ‘why’ Wehkamp needed to expand product variety was clear, but the ‘how’ would require out-of-the-box thinking. Realizing the challenge at hand, Wehkamp looked to Wordsmith to assist with the content creation efforts through Natural Language Generation.
By combining the structured data sets provided by the product’s manufacturer, with the multi-lingual power of NLG provided through Wordsmith, Wehkamp generated thousands of bespoke product descriptions in Dutch, at a scale unimaginable by their previous workflow.
“Our plan in 2018 was to onboard more products without increasing the size of our team. Automating the product descriptions with Wordsmith meant that we could scale our efforts, while saving time. Without Wordsmith, there would be no way for us to have done this as quickly and efficiently as we did.”
Wehkamp faced a difficult challenge: increase the number of products supported across their customer-facing retail channels without increasing the headcount of the digital marketing team. By channeling their structured data sets into Wordsmith’s easy-to-use narrative builder, Wehkamp generated thousands of search engine optimized product descriptions without adding or removing any staff.
Natural Language Generation through Wordsmith also allowed for content creation at an unparalleled speed. Thanks to branching logic and synonym functions, Wehkamp’s writers can reduce the amount of time needed for editing by creating brand-approved content guidelines up front. This means automated content generation follows the same tone and voice as their human-created narratives, for a seamless integration into the Wehkamp website.
Wehkamp’s copywriters and editors shifted their focus from the iterative work of creating product descriptions for each new item, to creating the necessary materials to help put their new products in front of the right buyers.
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