Australian sports shoe retailer creates loyalty through digitization
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Mark Teperson has created engaged repeat customers with data and better email targeting. Source: CMO[/caption]
The Athlete’s Foot, an Australian sports shoe retailer with 138 stores country-wide is learning how the online experience can help the in-store experience.
Director of the multichannel experience, Mark Teperson says that a large problem they face is finding “a way to connect to our customers in-between purchases, reinforce the value we created and the awesome experience they had in-store.”
The Athlete's Foot was suffering from a lack of continuity between the personalized and scientific in-store experience, and their promotional emailing. For example, a young male customer that leaves the store with shoes for a marathon would later be sent emails about shoes targeted at retiree age women.
Teperson and his team have changed all that by now segmenting email communications on 135 different criteria about the customer such as purchase data, what they browse on the website, age and demographics.
Athlete’s Foot has created a lifecycle communications strategy that evolves as the business learns more about the customer. Purchases are now followed by an email that thanks them and asks them to fill in a three-question survey. These are the Net Promoter question, and questions about how they utilize their shoes such as how frequently and how far they run.
These surveys give the Athlete’s Foot a communication strategy that is far more in line with customer needs. Now emails sent at different lifecycle stages include tips about training, how to tell when shoes are wearing out, and towards the end of a shoe’s lifespan reminders about shoe quality and replacement.
For the Athlete's Foot all these efforts have meant significant gains. By connecting between purchases with content that is relevant to the customer has meant a jump from 1.1 to 1.8 million loyalty program members and a 12 percent increase in voucher redemptions in just 12 months.
To learn more click here.
Under Armour and Sports Authority find new way to motivate workouts
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As a now leading sports brand, Under Armour is looking to push into technology. Source: Slamonline[/caption]
By linking workout activity with customer loyalty programs, Under Armour and Sports Authority are hoping to learn more about their customers and increase their spend value.
The sports clothing company Under Armour purchased the workout-tracking app MapMyFitness last year and is now working with U.S. sports equipment retailer Sports Authority to enhance loyalty. The 150 million people who are a part of Under Armour’s “Connected Fitness” group will receive workout challenges, and if completed they can win gift cards and points in Sports Authority loyalty program.
The philosophy is that active people that use fitness trackers are likely to buy sports apparel and footwear, and so the hope for Under Armour is that app users buy their apparel and footwear. And that is why there has been such a strong emphasis on marketing the community message of the brand. As Warren Kay, VP of advertising at Under Armour states:
Getting in shape and losing weight are all personal experiences, and we can recognize and reward those efforts all at the same time.
While for Sports Authority, the benefit of investing in technology allows them to strengthen their market position by better understanding purchase behavior in conjunction with customer activity levels.
This pairing of data though is just one small part of the growing Internet of Things industry. And in the wearables technology market Under Armour has to compete against big players like Google and Samsung, who are already forging ahead with efforts to combine health and consumer data.
The question is, will more interconnected data mean a better experience for customers or just an over-saturation of marketing?
More on Under Armour and Sports Authority after the click.
Facebook is introducing new emotions, but will it help understand customers
It may be far off still, but Facebook is considering introducing an ‘emoji’ type button for users to express their emotions, and it is going to have large implications for the way brands build long-term loyalty.
However, while the feature will allow businesses to gain insight into customer emotion, the button only indicates that the customer has an emotion. For brands, what the emotion relates to, will be hard understand. Is it the product, customer support or the user experience that customers are attributing their sentiment to?
The problem is that this could create a lot of positive and negative word of mouth with not much capacity for companies to know what segments of their experience is going right and wrong. Irrespective, if this feature does come into existence brands will need to have a strategy, as it will have an impact on loyalty.
More on the upcoming feature here.
In brief
ZenPayroll has now become Gusto and has a new score of 75.
IBM’s SPSS software has an NPS of 45.
The business analytics and intelligence software company SAS Institute has a score of 57.
While, Dutch telecom provides Telfort and KPN have scores of -3 and 7 respectively.
