The UK shoe retailer improves relevance and customer targeting by tapping into real-time online behaviours
The UK shoe retailer improves relevance and customer targeting by tapping into real-time online behaviours
Barratts wanted to increase the effectiveness of its customer targeting with an aggressive goal to increase revenue generated by email from 4% to 10%.
Specifically the company wanted to reduce the incidence of abandoned shopping carts across its seven online brands – Barratts, Mini Barratts, Priceless Shoes, Discount Shoe Store, Petit Feet, Big Shoe Boutique and Love Your Shoes – without increasing the workload placed on a limited team, making automation a key part of its strategy.
Paul Sanderson, Barratts e-commerce marketing manager, said: “We had been using a broad brush approach to customer segmentation, focusing most of our efforts on creating and sending out weekly newsletters for each of the seven online brands.
“We wanted to minimise manual processes to give us more time to work on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates and re-target customers with new products. We knew that we were missing opportunities because of a lack of integration between our data analytics system and the newsletter database. Bringing the two pools of information together would give us a more complete picture of customers and prospects, allowing the team to better understand online behaviours and execute more engaging campaigns.”
Triggering email campaigns
The retailer sought advice from the technical services team of Responsys on how to integrate the two data systems to achieve its objectives. The digital marketing solutions provider recommended deploying a trigger email campaign designed to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates using Responsys Interact Connect. The project targets individuals who abandon a purchase three days after they visited the site automatically. The first abandoned cart emails went live quickly, within just one month.
Sanderson continued: “We had been executing weekly emails for each site completely by hand. Responsys allows us to automate our e-newsletter programme and develop more tailored campaigns using the information we have to create trigger programmes. The Responsys Technical Services team worked with us to ensure the trigger emails are not too intrusive and set the right tone to engage the customer.”
In just one week the abandoned cart email programme generated a massive 11.5% increase in conversion rates from email compared with an average of 4.71%, exceeding the team’s objective of 10%. Overall the programme has led to a 168% increase in conversions rates and a 15% increase in average order values based on a 140% increase in open rates and a 123% boost to click through rates. It has been so successful that Barratts now plans to extend the programme across its other online brands.
Extending mobile and networking
To extend its communications with customers, Barratts has also been integrating social networking and mobile channels into its email campaigns. Adding the ‘share with your network’ capability and ‘follow us on Twitter’ functionality into email has helped to drive increased traffic to its online brands and social following, providing more opportunities for cross-channel engagement and targeting.
In March 2010 the company launched a bespoke shopping application on the iTunes store to coincide with an upgrade of its flagship Oxford Street store in London. This encourages customers to also shop online from a mobile device.
Sanderson said: “We fully understand the benefit of mobile and social in combination with email. We have been promoting our Facebook group and Twitter feed using email, which has proved particularly effective at boosting Barratt’s social following. We have also run a few email competitions to win a handbag for ‘sharing’ and ‘liking’ on Facebook which has been equally effective.”
“Most importantly we have learned that consistency and presence is a key aspect of building an integrated email programme that includes social and mobile. As a result we are planning to look more closely at a full m-commerce solution that integrates with Responsys. As more customers view emails on the move, the relationship between email and online promotions will be absolutely crucial.”
Plans for growth
He added that the retailer plans to grow its targeted cross-channel communications: “We now have greater visibility into customer patterns and online behaviours which has had an immediate positive impact on the company’s revenues. We plan to upgrade to Responsys Interact Suite version 6 to allow us to automate more programmes so we can target these new customers even more precisely according to their needs.
“We want to integrate our e-commerce system with our database, web analytics programme and Responsys to give us a deeper level of customer understanding. This will lead to more trigger email programmes, the introduction of a welcome programme for customers signing-up to e-newsletters and a recommendation facility to enable us to continue to boost revenues from email. In the future you can expect to see more integrated and tailored email programmes from Barratts and Responsys to offer customers a seamless cross-channel experience,” Sanderson concluded.
