Rack Room Shoes steps up its digital messaging strategy
A specialty retailer is exploring the next phase of its digital engagement journey — targeting social media communications.
Family footwear retailer Rack Room Shoes has been stepping up its digital communications efforts, with a goal of delivering more personalized messages via email, SMS texts and push notifications, and, in the near future, social media engagement. But the retailer wasn’t always on top of its digital messaging game.
Self-described as “late to the game” when it comes to digital engagement, Rack Room launched a loyalty program in 2013. However, pulling data from multiple sources — from POS and sales data to loyalty-specific data and SMS text lists — made it difficult to coordinate information and send personalized, “smart communications” to its 6 million members.
A very manual process further exacerbated targeted marketing efforts. Rather than reward customers for their shopping behavior, members only earned a discount once they hit a specific points threshold. Outgoing messages were often impersonal, mass emails — and not strong enough to drive consistent open rates or sales conversions.
“We were data rich, but nothing was actionable,” explained Scott Baldt, senior director of omnichannel of Rack Room Shoes, which is also the parent company of Off Broadway Shoes. “We realized that if we wanted to be successful, we needed to take our accumulated consumer data, and use it to create actionable results.”
Baldt wanted to create more personal and relevant email communications across both brands — and he wanted to use stored data to fuel the experience. He also needed to organize and merge customer information from all touch points into a single repository, a move that would make it easier to design targeted marketing campaigns and “increase the productivity of the messages we were sending,” Baldt added.
That’s when Rack Room added Salesforce’s cloud-based Marketing Cloud platform, a customer engagement solution designed to automate email communications based on customer segmentation.
With the new solution, all customer communications are now based on shoppers’ online and in-store transactions, as well as in-store order fulfillment. Once the messages are designed, the platform can conduct subject line testing, aid in customer segmentation analysis for more personalized engagement, and automate the delivery of content.
As individual members hit spending thresholds, they automatically receive an emailed reward based on their behavior. Rack Room also drives engagement through additional messages that count down the reward’s expiration — messages that are delivered via email, or text messages and push notifications.
Since launching the platform in October 2015, company’s loyalty base has jumped to 14 million members. Despite this increase, the automated platform has slashed the time Rack Room’s CRM team spends building and sending emails by 40%.
“We have also doubled our engagement,” Baldt reported. “We used to send an average of 2.3 non-targeted, mass emails per week. Now we send an average of 4.3 promotional, styled emails per week, and click rates are strong.”
Looking ahead, Baldt’s team plans to step up social media engagement. While the company collects information on these digital customer interactions to create targeted messages, “we engage these customers in an unsophisticated manner,” he said. “We share segmented files of CRM data with the digital marketing team to create targeted messages, but the process is very manual.”
Baldt envisions using the platform to create automated posts on social media — especially Facebook. These posts would contain relevant content targeted to specific members.
While there is no solid plan of a launch date, Baldt is eyeing the end of 2018.
Family footwear retailer Rack Room Shoes has been stepping up its digital communications efforts, with a goal of delivering more personalized messages via email, SMS texts and push notifications, and, in the near future, social media engagement. But the retailer wasn’t always on top of its digital messaging game.
Self-described as “late to the game” when it comes to digital engagement, Rack Room launched a loyalty program in 2013. However, pulling data from multiple sources — from POS and sales data to loyalty-specific data and SMS text lists — made it difficult to coordinate information and send personalized, “smart communications” to its 6 million members.
A very manual process further exacerbated targeted marketing efforts. Rather than reward customers for their shopping behavior, members only earned a discount once they hit a specific points threshold. Outgoing messages were often impersonal, mass emails — and not strong enough to drive consistent open rates or sales conversions.
“We were data rich, but nothing was actionable,” explained Scott Baldt, senior director of omnichannel of Rack Room Shoes, which is also the parent company of Off Broadway Shoes. “We realized that if we wanted to be successful, we needed to take our accumulated consumer data, and use it to create actionable results.”
Baldt wanted to create more personal and relevant email communications across both brands — and he wanted to use stored data to fuel the experience. He also needed to organize and merge customer information from all touch points into a single repository, a move that would make it easier to design targeted marketing campaigns and “increase the productivity of the messages we were sending,” Baldt added.
That’s when Rack Room added Salesforce’s cloud-based Marketing Cloud platform, a customer engagement solution designed to automate email communications based on customer segmentation.
With the new solution, all customer communications are now based on shoppers’ online and in-store transactions, as well as in-store order fulfillment. Once the messages are designed, the platform can conduct subject line testing, aid in customer segmentation analysis for more personalized engagement, and automate the delivery of content.
As individual members hit spending thresholds, they automatically receive an emailed reward based on their behavior. Rack Room also drives engagement through additional messages that count down the reward’s expiration — messages that are delivered via email, or text messages and push notifications.
Since launching the platform in October 2015, company’s loyalty base has jumped to 14 million members. Despite this increase, the automated platform has slashed the time Rack Room’s CRM team spends building and sending emails by 40%.
“We have also doubled our engagement,” Baldt reported. “We used to send an average of 2.3 non-targeted, mass emails per week. Now we send an average of 4.3 promotional, styled emails per week, and click rates are strong.”
Looking ahead, Baldt’s team plans to step up social media engagement. While the company collects information on these digital customer interactions to create targeted messages, “we engage these customers in an unsophisticated manner,” he said. “We share segmented files of CRM data with the digital marketing team to create targeted messages, but the process is very manual.”
Baldt envisions using the platform to create automated posts on social media — especially Facebook. These posts would contain relevant content targeted to specific members.
While there is no solid plan of a launch date, Baldt is eyeing the end of 2018.