Ello Group accelerates growth and publishes 10x faster with Contentstack

Ello Group creates lasting connections between brands and consumers. Born from the intelligence of The Dining Club Group, Ello Group provides brands with market leading dining, coffee and entertainment products to give consumers genuinely rewarding acquisition, engagement and loyalty schemes. Their solutions can be delivered either via its home-grown products of tastecard, Gourmet Society and Coffee Club, plugged into their client’s ecosystem via API or white label offering, or as an employee benefit. Ello Group helps its members enjoy more of what they love for less at some of the UK’s favourite restaurants, coffee shops and cinema brands (including Prezzo, Beefeater, Zizzi’s, Caffè Nero, Black Sheep Coffee, Krispy Kreme), 1000s of independents and many more.

Previously, achieving seamless content delivery across multiple brands was a significant challenge. It often meant relying on manual updates across multiple pages and lengthy lead times to keep content up-to-date and discoverable. Redirects and resolutions, for example, could take between two to four weeks to complete.

“Our previous technology stack wasn’t meeting our needs as a business to deliver content and enhanced customer experiences at speed or at scale, and was limiting our growth potential.” Tom Pressman, Head of Digital Marketing, said. “Our technical infrastructure meant publishing content was slow; and if we developed new components, we weren’t confident it wouldn’t have a negative performance impact elsewhere. We therefore decided to go to market to see what technology was out there to help support our goals”. 

The team identified three goals: 

1. Faster speed of development: Enabling front end non-technical users to create, edit, publish and configure in a flexible way to reduce support times and speed up operations. 

2. Frictionless customer experience: Site speed and general customer experience improvements to increase customer acquisition, and improved product discovery to support customers in signing up and using the product. 

3. Enhanced SEO: Improving site rankings and boosting search impressions to drive more organic traffic to their website, and to increase customer acquisition across their brands. 

“We issued an RFP to understand if our current solution was still the right vendor to meet our evolving needs and to support us, in partnership, as we scaled. After a thorough review which included speaking with other customers who were using Contentstack and seeing their confidence in the product and in headless technology, we were inspired! This move also aligned to our business direction of a MACH infrastructure to enable us to choose the ‘best of breed’ technology providers.”

Ello Group’s migration journey began by trialing Contentstack’s headless CMS on a lower-risk brand, the Ello Group corporate website. “We spun the corporate brand up first, learned from it, then took those learnings and developed them to launch Coffee Club and Gourmet Society. This iterative process allowed us to learn about our set up, integrations and delivery plans to be confident in launching our biggest brand, tastecard, seamlessly - something our internal team was able to achieve in partnership with Contentstack.” 

Ello Group also maximizes the value of Contentstack’s headless CMS by leveraging automation, front end hosting (Launch) and the Live Preview feature.

• Contentstack Launch: Supports faster partner updates to manage both published and unpublished changes.

• Live Preview: Allows content editors to review changes in production.

• Contentstack Automate: Allows content to be created, reviewed and updated for more than 9,000 restaurant locations, then reflected on the front end in a timely manner. 

“Partner content delivery, whether that’s onboarding new partners, removing old partners or updating offers and terms, means that we need to make changes quickly and within a certain timeframe. We are starting to see the benefit of Automate in our ability to automate the process from our other third party providers and into Contentstack.”

Contentstack's headless technology has enabled a composable and flexible architecture, allowing Ello Group to choose ‘best of breed’ for the right solutions, with a foundational plug-and-play layer. One example is the easy integration with their search tool. “Discoverability is a critical piece for us, as customers need to be able to understand what offers are near them, what those offers are, and to get inspiration,” Tom Pressman said. “We need to be obsessing over that search experience, and moving towards personalised recommendations and promotional capabilities for new partners to drive partner usage and incremental footfall.”

Behind the scenes, Ello Group has significantly sped up content delivery by leveraging reusable content and components across its brands, setting specific rules for elements such as SEO. Content authors can go in and make one change, and then publish across all brands, empowering marketing teams to make changes without the need to wait for technical stakeholders. 

“From a technical perspective, this means we can develop new components and templates and then replicate across all brands to deliver more exciting and engaging experiences for our customers. Content authors can then focus on content creation rather than having to duplicate work to deliver changes across multiple websites.”

Ello Group’s decision to move to Contentstack's headless CMS has yielded tangible benefits in terms of cost savings, accelerated content development and publishing, enhanced site performance, scalability, flexibility, and improved collaboration. Site performance scores have improved dramatically, now in the 90s, and the content publishing process has sped up tenfold. This has allowed the business to support its many brands and their customers faster and easier, and set the company up for continued digital excellence going forward. 

Next on the roadmap for Ello Group is to continue to expand the focus on search, discovery, education and prioritise new use cases for AI and personalisation to acquire new customers and grow its audience. 

Key wins for Ello Group with Contentstack include: 

• Reduced time to value: Templates and reusable components have shortened lead time for new assets from months down to weeks and days, and made sharing components across brands a matter of seconds. 

• A stable infrastructure: Development teams now have the confidence to quickly build, develop and deploy at scale, knowing that when content goes live it won’t add any risk to the wider digital environment. 

• SEO and impressions: Ello Group now ranks for more pages across search engines, and has seen a 70% improvement to their SEO and site audit scores, boosting customer experience and acquisition.