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It’s no secret: brick-and-mortar businesses have been struggling in recent years. This isn’t because people have stopped shopping in stores. In fact, 87% of shoppers say they have visited a retail store in the past month. What’s new is that these days, 56% of all in-store purchases are influenced by digital.
This presents a challenge for brands, but also an opportunity. Retailers that work to engage shoppers in new and creative ways will benefit from their efforts. What can brick-and-mortar brands do to adapt to a new reality that is as digital as it is physical?
Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Rack Room Shoes saw a 777% return on investment (ROI), recouped its costs in 2 months, and reported a 1:6.1 cost benefit ratio.
Together, Rack Room Shoes and Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse have 500 brick-and-mortar locations across the U.S. The two operate under separate brands, although both belong to the same German-based parent company.
Separate brands meant separate marketing teams, separate data, and separate campaigns. The brands wanted a single solution that would combine their teams and data, handle more, customized campaigns, and unify their messaging across channels. They partnered with Digital Fusion to plan their implementation and begin their transformation.
The switch to Salesforce Marketing Cloud gave Rack Room Shoes the opportunity to expand, customize, and unify their marketing campaigns across email and text. Using their employees’ previous knowledge of Salesforce, the brands were also able to build their own internal team and replace an increasingly expensive vendor.
ROI: 777%
Payback: 2 months
Average annual benefit: $11,122,990
So how did they do it?
Before transitioning to Marketing Cloud both brands’ data was all over the place, making it virtually impossible to see how consumers behave across channels and between brands.
Putting in the work to migrate all data — including store purchases and loyalty program information — into Marketing Cloud paid off. The data gave a better picture of the brands’ consumers.
Using what they learned, Rack Room Shoes decided to change the way shoppers signed up for their rewards program and implement a number of journeys to improve the digital to store experience.
Using Journey Builder, Rack Room Shoes has launched automated journeys for ratings and review, loyalty rewards, transactional emails, and customer feedback.
In addition to replacing the email blasts they’d been sending manually, these automated journeys grant a level of personalization and scalability the brand had lacked.
Rack Rooms Shoes also used Mobile Studio to automate and streamline their signup process for loyalty rewards.
Rather than trying to collect all of a shopper’s information in-store, the new, faster process only required shoppers to provide a mobile phone number at checkout. SMS messages — sent with Mobile Studio — then captured additional information like email addresses and zip codes.
These tactics not only increased the rewards program capture rate by 33% (Rack Room Shoes) and 15% (Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse), it also improved the accuracy of emails received. In fact, the brands saw a lift in all the program’s KPIs, including a 451% jump in revenue from SMS.
Beyond ROI and KPIs, the switch to Marketing Cloud changed Rack Room Shoes’ approach to its own marketing and team structure.
Rather than heavily leaning on third-party vendors, Rack Room Shoes’ internal marketing team now works with a few strategic partners and executes its own digital marketing program, granting them a degree of control and efficiency they didn’t have before.
By transitioning to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Rack Room Shoes gave a much needed jolt to its marketing strategy and turned in some impressive numbers. Check out the full case study for the breakdown.
