Total CX

Socialized, Mobilized, and Personalized: Bakers Shoes

By Sue Aldrich

Bakers Shoes is a chain of retail stores with extensive online properties for engaging its customers. Importantly for Bakers Shoes’ future, it has established successful mechanisms to increase intimacy with customers – and collects masses of data about those customers. Using Facebook and its own Shoeternity site and blog, Bakers Shoes collects implicit data about customer preferences.

Bakers Shoes’ strategy for its online and mobile resources is based on analysis of interaction data and unceasing testing of designs, paths, and offers. For example, traffic analysis revealed that customers were using its mobile site to read reviews and check inventory before going to a store. This analysis convinced Bakers Shoes to abandon the mobile app tactic and invest in ongoing improvement of its mobile site. Bakers Shoes personalizes product recommendations automatically, leading to an increase in average order value of 40 percent for orders where the customer has clicked on one of these recommendations. Tactics for recommendations and offers are constantly tested and optimized to continually improve sales results.

Bakers Shoes’ Facebook page presents style suggestions, collects likes and customer comments, and, of course, clickthroughs to the commerce site. Shoeternity takes friendship further: this is the site where customers post photos of their “looks” and post comments and likes about the posts of others. Posts are extensively tagged with words describing the shoes, the effect, and the environment for wearing the look. I can search these tags to find out if animal prints (tiger, zebra, etc.) are out of fashion. Only five posts use the words “animal print,” and none this year. OK, forget the giraffe-print booties; they are so last year.

Bakers Shoes can use this trove of data in automatically select products to recommend to shoppers, in making stocking decisions, in choosing images for banners and other ads, and in choosing topics for Facebook and Shoeternity blog posts.

Bakers Shoes Mobile Pages

(Click on image to enlarge.)

© 2012 Patricia Seybold Group Inc. and Bakers Footwear Group.

Bakers Shoes has created a mobile site that is consistent with the web site, but with simplified navigation and displays. The shoes selected in response to a navigation choice are those most likely to interest the customer. In a click, the customer can like it, order it, or find a store that carries it.

~ Sue

Managing the Web Experience You Offer

Our resident e-marketing and merchandising guru, Sue Aldrich, offers practical advice on how to manage your web experience (which includes mobile, kiosk, or any self-service touchpoint) to achieve a better customer experience, better customer relationships, improved business results, more control over the web experience, and more consistent brand representation. Sue provides three best practices and nine guiding principles that will help you successfully implement these practices:

Her three best practices (and implementation principles):

1. Design a Personalized Experience To Engage Customers and Support Your Business

• Be your customers’ guide
• Help customers get everything they need
• Establish strategy and plans to meet business goals and customer goals

2. Provision Your Organization for Success

• Develop a skills plan
• Develop a tools strategy and plan

3. Monitor and Optimize Your Plan

• Measure what matters to your customers
• Measure what matters to your business
• Measure what matters to your function
• Establish Optimization Programs

Within her report, Sue offers relevant examples from a number of B2C and B2B retailers. She describes what to do and how to measure your results in order to continue to improve the web experience you offer customers and to reap the benefits.

Best Practices for Web Experience Management
How to Identify the Right Strategy, Plans, Tactics, and Metrics to Achieve Business and Customer Goals
By Susan E. Aldrich, SVP and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, December 8, 2011