Leading footwear retailer uses Adobe® Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, to increase product recommendation click-through rates by 60% and boost revenues across channels.

Taking the first step

For nearly a century, Bakers Shoes has been a leading retailer of the latest trends in footwear and accessories. The company strives to deliver the most comprehensive array of choices—from boots and pumps to espadrilles—and the highest level of customer service in hundreds of retail stores throughout the United States, and to more than a million online visitors monthly.

Historically, the company’s brick-and-mortar stores have long been the major force behind its sales and continue to be the cornerstone of the business’ success. In recent years, however, consumers’ attention has turned toward the online retail channel, and Bakers managers sought an analytics platform to help optimize its web strategies, deliver extraordinary online and in-store experiences, and exceed customer expectations.

Working with Adobe Consulting, for Omniture technology, Bakers adopted the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, to better understand customer preferences and leverage these insights to create a sustainable, growth-oriented online marketplace that complements its brand. The e-commerce presence enables customers to enjoy all the conveniences and experiences of shopping in a store from virtually any computer or mobile device and any location—including the company’s more than 230 retail stores.

“We needed an effective way to create better brand and product awareness, drive more traffic, and convert more sales across multiple platforms,” says Scott Cohn, director of merchandising and e-commerce at Bakers Shoes. “The Adobe Online Marketing Suite gives us the insight into customer behaviors we need to create an engaging online environment and personalized shopping experience that gives people more of what they want.”

Creating an in-store experience online

Having relied on in-person retail sales for so long, leveraging the emergence of online shopping for growth was an intriguing, if not difficult, undertaking. One of the primary challenges of online retail is attracting customers to the site and keeping them engaged. The Adobe Online Marketing Suite features powerful, integrated analytics that enable marketers to measure, analyze, and optimize integrated data—across online initiatives, multiple marketing channels, and technologies. From a single dashboard, marketers gain a holistic view of web traffic drivers, conversion rates, and other important data.

Bakers managers use the detailed, real-time reports to understand where website traffic originates, analyze customer interactions and pathways, and identify dropout points to enhance content or layouts for improved site performance.

“The Adobe solution helps us thoroughly evaluate the elements and navigation that drives conversion and those that don’t,” says Cohn. “The actionable data we collect is the foundation for creating the most intuitive, engaging, and productive site design possible—in half the time.”

In fact, by analyzing the mobile device reports in Adobe SiteCatalyst, managers observed a spike in traffic to the standard website from smartphone devices during the summer of 2010. After presenting this data to the CEO, the team was able to justify an investment in building a mobile optimized website to better serve the needs of mobile shoppers. Since Bakers took a more measured approach to the decision, they have focused marketing spend on a mobile website that enables broad reach across multiple device platforms and lays the foundation for social media campaigns that achieve the highest value to its customers and to its bottom line.

Adobe online analytics solutions helped the company understand customer interactions with its mobile site and social networking pages to determine how and why customers accessed a mobile destination.

Analysis showed that customers visited the mobile site to read product reviews, browse inventory, and conduct other purchase-related research prior to coming into a store—a determining factor in electing to optimize its existing mobile site over spending time and resources to develop an app. Many visitors, it turns out, had arrived to the site after viewing special offers and coupons made available on the company’s various social media pages, such as its Facebook fan page.

“Analyzing customer interactions and navigation was essential in helping us formulate a successful mobile strategy,” Cohn says. “The Adobe Online Marketing Suite provided data that prompted us to dedicate our resources to develop a fully optimized mobile site that provides a rich, dynamic experience to complement in-store shopping and extend our reach into social media.” As a result, mobile has grown to 20% of overall site visits.

Buy one, get one

While improved design and navigation on its standard and mobile websites has helped Bakers attract more visitors, increasing conversions and revenues was a key objective of the company’s e-commerce team. “Our physical locations have always been the backbone of our company, but e-commerce represents an additional opportunity for growth we just can’t ignore,” Cohn says. “The Adobe Online Marketing Suite not only helped streamline the development of the revamped sites, but also plays a crucial role in extracting the most value from them.”

In the past, employees had to scour online visitor data and manually input product recommendations, a process that could take days at a time and yield only a handful of appropriate alternative and complementary products. With Adobe product recommendation solutions, the process is automated, leveraging historical data in the company’s database and real-time online analytics to present more timely and relevant cross-selling options for increased conversion and revenue.

“We optimize both the traditional site and mobile site with the same product recommendations seasonally and re-evaluate it constantly to help ensure we’re delivering the most relevant products more often,” Cohn says. “Automating recommendations with Adobe solutions has increased clicks on recommended products by 60%, achieved a lift of 8% in conversions, and produced a 7% increase in revenue per visit (RPV), as well as a 40% improvement in average order value (AOV) compared to customers who did not click on a recommended product.”

High-value targeting

Cohn says that retailers strive to achieve a delicate balance of providing customers all the information they need to buy the products they want without overcomplicating navigation and creating confusion.

“Looking at the results delivered versus how much it cost us, the Adobe Online Marketing Suite was a win from the start,” Cohn says. “We’re able to present reasonable, valid, and relevant recommendations automatically, saving us countless hours of manual data entry and providing our customers with a terrific experience.”

Cohn speaks highly of the company’s future plans with Adobe solutions and the Adobe Consulting, for Omniture technology team, noting that Bakers will be undertaking further targeting initiatives such as adding category-specific recommendations, personalizing recommendations based on previous customer actions, and integrating video into the mobile site to enhance in-store interactions.

“Working with Adobe Consulting, for Omniture technology to make sure we were on the right path by identifying our key performance indicators (KPIs) and establishing parameters to measure against them puts us in a good position to capitalize on the wealth of information we can collect and analyze with the Adobe Online Marketing Suite,” Cohn says. “We’re ecstatic with our results so far and are eager to explore other avenues for bringing the best products and services to our customers everywhere.”