Tom Tailor: How to Encourage Offline Customers to Buy Online

Why Mindbox? Our online store and brick-and-mortar stores have always operated separately. We have always had a problem when trying to combine the online and offline sides of the business. Combining the two sides was impossible with our last CRM contractor, resulting in each side operating separately. The main focus behind choosing Mindbox was the chance to combine customer bases and build a shared communications network through both channels. This year, our main task was to encourage offline customers to buy online. Mindbox enabled us to follow online and offline customers’ actions and their journeys

Email Channel Modernization. We have changed the visual template of our campaigns a lot and are more than happy with everything currently related to our communications. With the last mailing system, we had template issues as well as limited capabilities. Generally, it was a stand-alone tool with limited features that were incapable of giving an overall view of data from both channels. However with Mindbox, we can now view online and offline purchases as well as break down and evaluate the details to see who our customers are and what they prefer. For this reason, we are now getting clearer and deeper insights that we can be happy with

Challenges. It has taken a lot of hard work to merge the two customer bases. It is difficult for me to name the exact reasons for the challenges we faced. For example, the database cleansing process took us quite a while before we could proceed with joining the two bases. From time to time we still come across some details that were somehow missed by the platform. I cannot be sure where exactly the problem lies, whether it be with the platform or with our system. However, such problems have happened far less over the past 6 months.

Although the Mindbox manager we work with isn’t as accessible as our own full-time employee, we are happy with the level of communication, leadership and personal approach we receive. However, we have been short-handed and would have appreciated 40% more of his time during the initial 3 to 4 months since the project’s inception. It would have considerably boosted the launch’s success.

We agree that the first 3 to 4 months are always the most important. During this period, a select manager studies our customer’s technology stack. Usually we need 3 to 5 days to prepare the terms of reference (ToR) along with all the planned campaigns. After that, the client’s development team will get involved. However, the teams have limited resources so they are not always able to add a large number of unique details and planned workflows quickly in the beginning. To facilitate a launch we recommend:

— Highlighting project priorities and breaking up the integration into various steps. After at least one milestone or a part of ToR has been completed, the project can bring value. At the same time, the team should prepare to activate new campaigns and train for future integrations.

— Before the project is launched, the company’s IT department and/or service vendor (s) should study sample ToRs and prepare for integration. This way, the team can resolve or be ready for most of the potential issues at introductory meetings.

— Syncing timeframes with the integration team to understand and plan when the project can be started. It is very important to carefully monitor internal task queues as well as the development sprints, especially since desynchronization in the first stage can shift or change the timing of the entire launch.

In general, we are happier with Mindbox. We are able to collect much more data on customers and their actions and launch more automated campaigns rather than worry in that something may go wrong. We are now able to run A/B tests to test our campaigns.

We are happy the platform has now introduced workflows based on triggered events. However, we would like to have a simple analytical tool in order to investigate campaigns in each communication sequence. We need to understand how our campaigns work as a whole at every stage, as in where and at what point we lead a customer, why they have bought certain items, etc.

Mindbox’s drawback is that they have a pretty weak Business Intelligence (BI) module. We decided not to wait for Mindbox to improve it and took on the analytics ourselves instead. We decided to get the raw data from the Mindbox data warehouse and then load the results into Microsoft PowerBI.

The Mindbox team is very enthusiastic about platform development. They are always ready to consider client requests, even irregular ones coming from client specifics. Many clients are unwilling to change their business processes to fit a CRM module. Instead, they expect the vendor to adjust their CRM module requirements or add features, just as it was in our experience.

For example, the retail chain and the online store keep their own books for warehouse inventory. Accordingly, the two channels might have different items in stock and different discounts. To fix this, Mindbox implemented an additional feature to track what the store sold or cross-sold to the customer as well as any items they may have decided not to buy.

The team was able to integrate everything we planned. Whenever new demands come up, new integrations are put in place. For example, the POS had to be adjusted to support filling in of missing emails for long-standing retail customers. Tom Tailor and Mindbox’s teams worked hard together to debug and test the necessary features.

We never stop working with the customer — we keep engaging our customers and implementing additional capabilities. Specifically, we are now adjusting the feature that encourages customers to type in feedback for their current brick-and-mortar store on a global map application, such as Google Maps.

Our main rule is this: if a campaign requires a lot of work and requires the efforts of a designer, copywriter, etc. or needs more idea elaboration, we send it manually first. If it turns out to be effective and we see its results, we then automate it. This helps us ensure campaigns are profitable while helping save resources on creating manual campaigns.

If you test lots of different strategies, you might get surprising results. Our loyalty level upgrade campaigns are a good example of this. In order to send fewer communications but still get more revenue, we estimated the RPE (revenue per email) and the ratio between the number of campaigns and the customer base.

Triggers have become a sensitive topic for us. Before migrating to Mindbox, there were eight triggers for the online stores and five for the retail stores. Now there are 54 of them that generate significant revenue. Recently, we had a technical issue where our triggers failed and stopped working. Within days the number of orders fell by almost a third.

For over a year, we have been trying to engage offline retail customers to encourage them to buy online. What’s noteworthy is that there is a 0.4–0.5% conversion rate with retail customers in various communication channels, including SMS, whereas the SMS conversion with online customers is always over 1%. This shows us that most offline customers are not eager to buy, which makes it more difficult to influence and engage them.

As another example, since early May, we have been handing out flyers with the 50% online order discount at our offline stores and estimating its potential value. In the end, we found that there were two challenges that needed to be fixed. The first was to ensure that our offline store teams handed out our flyers to customers, particularly with customers who weren’t interested in online sales that didn’t appear especially beneficial. The second challenge was to motivate customers to buy online. This promotion did not bring in that many orders, with the conversion rate being only 0.4–0.5%. We came to the conclusion that this figure is the average offline to online conversion for our brand. In autumn, we plan to extend this promotion over the whole retail chain in every brick-and-mortar store we have.

As soon as we started sending out campaigns, half of the orders were from retail customers who had never bought online in the past. Therefore, Mindbox helped us to see how the traditional email channel can influence both online and offline sales.

Our customers played an active role in determining the loyalty program’s rules and the level names by participating in our surveys. For customers, the transition was easy and simple. Customer levels/statuses were gradually upgraded and transferred from their initial setting to a new segment. After transferring all levels, we quickly substituted the segments, turned off the old segments and turned on the new ones.

In reality, nothing has changed for the customer. We do not inform customers directly about changes in the loyalty program to avoid a large volume of questions. Instead, we inform only active customers in pop-up windows whenever they visit our website or at a POS at one of our retail stores.