Canyon Bicycles is a leading manufacturer of racing, mountain and triathlon bikes. Regarded as some of the best value options on the market, top athletes and the best teams worldwide rely on the brand’s high-tech bikes. Canyon is a pure-play digital brand, selling its bikes online and direct-to-consumer, without intermediaries or sales partners. This is exceptional because the advice-intensive offer from Canyon speaks of a classic offline retail business. So, how has Canyon managed to become a leader in the cycling industry?

A PURELY DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

As a pure online player, Canyon sells all of its bikes online. This means that 100% of the product experience takes place digitally. The challenge here is to meet the high information needs of customers and to build trust, as sports bikes are rarely a spontaneous purchase.

If customer interaction is primarily digital, this also creates new challenges such as customer anonymity. It is therefore important to better understand the interaction of consumers with the Canyon brand, to know which customers are interested in which products, and then build individual and relevant worlds of experience for them, across all touchpoints.

CONNECTING THE DOTS WITH A CROSS-CLOUD SOLUTION

Canyon recognised that the sales funnel is no longer linear and that commerce has evolved to be not just about shopping, but about building trust across all touchpoints. From chatbots to customer service, social channels to the site itself, every channel needs to provide a consistent, seamless journey. And to be seamless requires a well-integrated technical solution that covers all those touchpoints. 

For its most important brand experience touchpoints, Canyon relies on Salesforce Cloud services. It is one of a few brands utilising a real cross-cloud Salesforce solution, comprising Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud. Overall, this creates a digital ecosystem that provides a lot of agility at a customer-facing level through the fast creation, rollout and updating of digital channels, and at an operational level through the data processing and insight capabilities of Salesforce.

While Salesforce’s cloud applications can be used separately, and in tandem with other marketing and commerce platforms, they excel when used together. They support each other by creating a throughline from discovery through to conversion and retention. The data collected by each cloud informs the other, guiding the marketing messaging that draws in and converts new customers. This is reflected internally; marketing teams' ad roles are not siloed, enabling a cohesive user experience across the entirety of Canyon’s digital estate. 

With Salesforce’s cloud platforms working in tandem, agile responsive work is an easier task. The combination of being able to see developing trends in sales, turning this information into a campaign, and quickly bolstering the commerce and marketing channels with fresh content in line with new consumer demands is a great example of the back and forth flow between Salesforce’s Commerce and Marketing Cloud.

A MODERN COMMERCE SOLUTION

With the implementation of the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Canyon and Dept created a modern e-commerce platform that reflects the sophisticated design of the physical products. A robust reference architecture and a content library help to create and launch new content quickly and easily.

The new online shop was rolled out globally; over 80 country pages in 18 languages with 15 currencies. The capabilities of Commerce Cloud have enabled Canyon to offer its customers individually customised shopping experiences. It’s now easy to integrate external resources and to optimise and automate work processes such as translations, 360 ° images and customer reviews.

Thanks to the multi-cloud use, Canyon is also able to internally design highly complex and technical customer journeys, such as back-in-stock and abandoned cart messages or post-sales communication such as surveys and review requests.

The sophisticated technology architecture is the heart of Canyon’s online-only business model. A truly 360 ° customer experience requires the smart combination of technology, creativity and data; Dept and Canyon are working together to create a holistic digital brand experience by gradually optimising all touchpoints, from awareness through to purchase. This includes the development and implementation of integrated strategies for digital marketing, data-driven optimisation of all measures, and the continuous development of user-centred experiences (UX / UI) and applications.