Shoe Carnival is scaling its local search marketing in an effort to drive incremental in-store traffic and sales as well as improve the overall customer experience, using a local marketing automation platform from SIM Partners.
Shoe Carnival, which has more than 400 U.S. retail stores, can now easily cleanse and distribute its store location data to ensure visibility and accuracy across listings in local and mobile search results, online directories and maps.
The location publishing capabilities allow Shoe Carnival’s search and mobile-optimized store location pages to feature unique content for each store, as well as a responsive store locator.
Shoe Carnival is turning “near me” searches into store purchases with Velocity Wallet offers, which are being tested at specific locations by leveraging a consumer’s mobile wallet. Personalized mobile wallet offers enable Shoe Carnival to accelerate the mobile purchase path, while creating a seamless user experience.
Once downloaded to a mobile device, mobile wallet offers can be redeemed in-store as well as used for location-based GPS and beacon notifications.
“This gives us the ability to track and measure the link between online search and offline sales,” said Todd Beurman, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Shoe Carnival. “Once downloaded on a consumer’s device, mobile wallet offers also give Shoe Carnival stores the ability to connect with its shoppers via customized notifications.”
Beurman said the company has seen mobile on-page interactions increase by more than 200% in a 30-day period. Total on-page actions increased 165% in a 30-day period.
He said ensuring the very best experience across the entire buyer journey This begins with a local “near me” search by search engine, map search or another discovery outlet.
Shoe Carnival was able to scale its local marketing efforts to ensure visibility and relevance across the entire local marketing ecosystem so that customers no matter where they are have the best possible shopping experience. He said mobile plays a huge role in the company’s local shopping search strategy, both in terms of customer experience and customer acquisition.
According to recently released Google data, words like “near me,” “closest” and “nearby” are increasingly common across the billions of monthly queries. In fact, Google search interest in “near me” queries has increased 34 times since 2011 and nearly doubled last year.
“Connecting the in-store and online experiences is so crucial today with the increase in ‘near me’ searches on mobile devices,” said Beurman. “To convert those searches to in-store sales, our store locations need to be visible in the moments where and when people are looking for them.”