AN INTIMATE OCCASION
David’s Bridal gets personal with advanced digital analytics
There are few events more personal in a woman’s life than her wedding. Thus, for the 330-plus-store David’s Bridal, knowing the customer on an intimate level across channels is vitally important.
For the past seven years, the wedding apparel retailer has been using IBM digital analytics technology, starting with an IBM Coremetrics implementation, to ensure the company knows all about its customers.
“We originally decided we needed a more predominant e-commerce footprint and knew tracking sales wouldn’t be good enough,” said Jerry Baklycki, director of Web and marketing systems at David’s Bridal, Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. “We needed user information — where they were coming from, what they were looking at.”
Marrying Data Streams
Since initial implementation of IBM analytics, David’s Bridal has kept pace with product upgrades and evolution in capability in what is now the IBM Digital Analytics suite of analytical solutions from IBM Commerce. In that time, the retailer has gained considerable sophistication in the insights it can obtain about the customers visiting its website, as well as its stores.
“We have grown in maturity from measuring page views and clicks to measuring user segments such as bridal traffic compared with bridesmaid traffic,” Baklycki explained. “We can also look at segments like mobile compared with desktop entry point and natural search compared with direct-load email.”
The retailer also analyzes shopper behavioral data, including how long they spend on the website and then the lag time between when they visit the site and visit a store.
“After the shopper visits the store, we determine what the next contact should be and what message the shopper should receive,” Baklycki said. David’s Bridal primarily uses email for follow-up marketing and messaging, but customers receive different email promotions depending on how they are segmented.
In addition to sending customers promotions segmented by shopping behavior, David’s Bridal also segments promotions according to what type of connected device customers use to engage with the retailer.
“We’re seeing a similar shift that other retailers are seeing into mobile,” stated Baklycki. “We need to know who our customer is as a consumer, what device type she uses to shop and what device type she uses to open her email.”
Getting Out the Message
As a result of running promotions specifically segmented for mobile consumers, David’s Bridal has seen steep increases in open and click-through rates of email messages sent to mobile users.
To further optimize its customer experience according to the channel of engagement each individual customer chooses, David’s Bridal has moved to using a responsive design-based content strategy. From a single Web database, the retailer can populate customer messaging with content that is automatically formatted to the contours and specifications of whatever PC, tablet or handheld device the customer is using.
David’s Bridal can also automatically format email content as well as site content. In addition to providing customers with a cohesive, unified omnichannel experience, the retailer obtains a single view of the customer. This allows much deeper and more accurate customer analysis, which in turn enables more accurate segmentation, targeting and personalization. Ultimately, the company wants to be able to identify customers across as many channels as possible to get as full a picture as possible of what they are looking for and how they prefer to shop.
“The next thing is to tie the behavior of the customer offline to the email campaign,” Baklycki said.