Redefining the vision for a online luxury children's retailer

Challenge

A leading online retailer in the children’s space was well known for its wide selection of merchandise and its brand appeal. It sells its collections primarily via its own website, and drives marketing through online channels like social media, paid web advertisements, and online influencer networks. In recent years, the managers reported declining conversion rates and average order value per customer across nearly every product type, against industry benchmarks. The retailer asked Genova Digital for help in understanding the drivers of customer value and behaviour, and to develop an online marketing strategy to optimise conversion rates, and potentially increase average customer order value.

"We are seen by many customers as having an aspirational brand at a premium price, but not a premium experience."

Client
Marketing Manager

Discovery

We started by delving deeply into the analytics, correlating customer life time value with product categories across the board. Based on our profit map model, we created customer segments based on revenue and profit. As part of our exploratory process, we brainstormed with the marketing managers in creating customer personas, and the psychoanalysis for each of them. 

The managers were able to quickly grasp the customer segments the company should pursue, and therefore potentiate additional economical benefits if the team manage to present cross-sell selections to the consumer at the 'right time'. One important insight discovered during the process was that the customer's purchase behaviour follows the child development phases. The current customer data do not capture this detail, and therefore poses uncertainty as to what this ‘right time’ is.

We then explored solutions and decided on creating a mobile application for parents to monitor child development and present relevant products that they can prepare to aid in their own child’s development phase. The team identified top applications in this area for competitive analysis. More importantly, the app captures child information input by the customer, so the team does not have to rely on ambiguous guesswork based on purchase data. This gave time specificity to the marketing managers to cross-sell products across categories relevant to each development phase.

"Companies try to ensure that customers will be happy with the interaction when they connect with their product, customer service, or marketing materials. But this siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes—along the entire journey taken—can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve performance."

Katrina Talley
Consultant, Genova Digital

Impact

The exercise helped the retailer to reach its goals. The marketing team was able to work on cross-selling effectively through the mobile application. This also transcends into changed web behaviour where more users were observed to explore multiple product categories in a single session, realising the goal of “crossing the aisle”. The mobile application was also rated top 10 locally with about 1 million downloads in the first 6 months since launch.

Key ROI results include:

• Conversion rates across some product categories increased dramatically while overall conversion rate increased by 6 points.  
• Average customer order value increased 27%, with expectations of this metric to grow as efforts to shift more customers into the high revenue, high profit category.
• Mobile application downloads rose at 95% rate, which is a signifier for successful marketing launch and superior quality over competitors’ applications.

"Our customer journey did not start when the customer chances upon our advertisement or store. It starts when the parent becomes curious about his or her child development. My team is extremely pleased with the work that Genova Digital produced and we look forward to more exciting changes they help to make in the world."

Client
CMO