Creating a unified customer experience across channels through a shared repository of store and ecommerce data, as well as striking a balance on its ecommerce site between sales and branding, is a lot of the focus these days at apparel retailer Steve Madden.
“What we want to do is present products to customers as consistently as possible from a price and promotion standpoint across channels,” said Mark Friedman, president of ecommerce for Steve Madden, who will be a keynote speaker on the topic at IRCE on June 9. “The whole concept of CRM is not new, but a lot of retailers are struggling to capture information on customers and their transactions at the point of sale, and have that data in the same database as online purchases, matching up customer activity wherever they shop.”
To help it get there, Friedman said Steve Madden is not only combining cross-channel customer into a single data “lake” but layering business intelligence on top to analyze that data and better segment customers, thus connecting with them in a more targeted, personalized manner. “For instance if we know someone has bought both from stores and online, they’re likely to be a better customer (in terms of order value) than someone who only bought in one channel,” Friedman said.
Adding BI on top of the of store and ecommerce transaction data from one location gives Steve Madden information like where a customer is buying from (mobile, desktop, retail, etc.), at which stores, how frequently, what they’re buying, and if it’s primarily full price or discounted.
“There are all different levels of information we can access,” he said. “As people fall off the active buyer file, we want to promote to them aggressively with reactivation messaging, which is different from those who are still buying in store. We want to have as much data as possible and mine it, all with the intention of delivering more targeted messaging than we might be able to do today.”
Friedman said the company’s ecommerce site, replatformed two years ago, is designed to strike a balance between sales and branding. “Our old site was very commerce-based in nature,” he said. “We still want to sell, but also want to extend the brand. We’re not a big advertiser, so we’re using our site to drive that.”
Other initiatives at Steve Madden include a modification of its POS system to add features and functionality, especially in regards to capturing data as noted above, and a new mobile app that was launched two months ago.
Mike O’Brien is Senior Editor of Multichannel Merchant