Moda Operandi, a high-end retailer of designer fashion goods, knows its clientele won’t settle for one-size-fits-all products. So when CTO Keiron McCammon talks about his company’s eCommerce strategy as “high tech, high touch,” what he’s really talking about is the highest degree of personalization possible with marketing, service and customer relationship management.
“Our customers spend tens of thousands of dollars online, which puts them in a pretty rarified territory for fashion and merchandise,” McCammon explained, and consequently, Moda isn’t a high-volume, get-as-many-viewers-as-you-can kind of site. “We have to do more with smaller amounts of customer data; our reach isn’t as expansive as a traditional eCommerce business.”
Moda Operandi, launched in 2010, enables high-end customers to pre-order the latest ready-to-wear fashion, shoes, and accessories months before they’re available elsewhere, as well as a curated selection of in-season products. According to one report, the average Moda customer spends $1,400 per order seven times a year. “How we build and maintain customer relationships is paramount to us,” McCammon said, with no small amount of understatement. “But the human touch is still needed where someone is buying a luxury product online.”
Moda uses a variety of marketing channels – browsing history, emails, phone calls with Moda stylists, online chats via its native iOS app and WhatsApp, plus physical events or appointments at its boutiques in New York and London.
In 2016, Moda set its sights on using a business-to-consumer approach using CRM.
The needs of B2C CRM are quite different from regular CRM, according to McCammon. “We’re looking to break down silos and get a 360-perspective of how our clients are interacting with us and vice versa,” he said. The goal is to combine clickstream data, email notifications and click-through rates, among other data types. “We’ve not integrated them quite yet, but we’re headed there,” he said.
Enter Boston-based Zaius, a B2C CRM provider that uses the cloud to deliver cross-channel marketing automation, single-customer views and analytics. It’s that combination of technology that will drive demonstrable growth for today’s B2C marketers and help them get to grips with cross-channel activity, according to Zaius CEO Mark Gally.
“We fit at the center of all the different marketing technology systems and help customers make sense of it by harvesting data from Websites mobile apps, email — all of it,” Gally said. Today’s marketing systems must be able to resolve multiple IDs for the same customer, and understand that someone may have browsed on their mobile phone, gone home and browsed more on a laptop, then later purchased with a tablet. “We can stitch together those interactions across all those devices, where a marketing tech system can’t do that,” he added.
Moda has been using Zaius analytics for a couple years, which helped Moda marketers get a richer view of their clients. So when Moda embarked on its B2C CRM push, it was an easy decision to expand with the Zaius platform. Analytics, according to McCammon, is at the heart of driving consistent insights from customer data. “I can then think about actions to influence a set of users or get them to behave in a certain way. I can segment and set up campaigns to drive action… maybe an email or a push notification.” The Zaius technology will also eventually allow Moda to influence behavior and change up website functionality, based on what the customer is doing on the site. That functionality is expected to go live by the end of the year, he added.
What McCammon has already started to notice is a “feedback loop,” which creates both recommendations for the client as well as insights about what they want and how they shop. “When you talk about changing the way the website works based on browsing, you need a tight feedback loop,” he added. “Instead of data with lots of different siloes, we point back to a single hub like Zaius, which Influences campaigns we create and improves the experience of our customers.
“A big part of the traffic we drive to the site is new customers where we see what they’re doing and grabbing their preferences. How can we start responding and adapting to that?” McCammon said. “We’ll continue to experiment and develop this part of our strategy to get a 360 view and integrate more. That’s where Zaius can help us.”
