Iconic retailer saves $500,000 a year with analytics to better understand and enhance its customersÂ’ online shopping experience

Iconic retailer saves $500,000 a year with analytics to better understand and enhance its customers’ online shopping experience

Macy’s, one of America’s best-known retailers, is using SAS Enterprise Miner to better understand and enhance its customers’ online shopping experience.

The analytics includes measuring the impact of its online marketing initiatives on Macy's store sales more effectively, resulting in an email subscription churn reduction of 20%.

Macys.com also uses SAS Enterprise Miner to validate and guide the site's cross and up-sell offer algorithms.

Managing information requests

Meanwhile requests for ad-hoc reports come in from all over the company. These data-rich reports were taking analysts four to twelve hours to produce – much of it busy work that involved cutting and pasting from Excel spreadsheets.

The retailer's online business is now using SAS to automate the reports, saving more than half a million dollars a year in terms of analyst hours. Now staff can maximise time spent on providing value-added analyses and insights to provide content, products and offers that guarantee a personalised shopping experience for Macys.com customers.

"We want to understand customer lifetime value," explained Kerem Tomak, vice president of analytics for Macys.com. "We want to understand how long our customers have been with us, how often an email from us triggers a visit to our site. This helps us better understand who our best customers are and how engaged they are with us. With that knowledge we can give our valuable customers the right promotions in order to serve them the best way possible. Customers share a lot of information with us – their likes and dislikes – and our task is to support them in return for their loyalty by providing them with what they want, instantly.”