A marketer’s job doesn’t end when the customer reaches the register. On the contrary, a purchase signifies the start of a journey towards retention and loyalty. However, generating continuous engagement and repeat purchases isn’t easy. Just ask footwear brand Melissa Shoes.
Melissa Shoes, known for its plastic footwear, struggled to get customers to return to its stores and engage after an initial visit.
“When she walks out the door, our engagement with her ends,” says Michele Levy, CEO of Melissa Shoes’ distributor Ilhabela Holdings Inc.
Levy wanted to find a way to re-engage these customers, learn more about them, and get them to return to the store to ultimately drive conversion. However, she wanted to do this by leveraging channels customers already use and which allow them to express themselves.
So, in April, she installed M-ND’s interactive display terminals in Melissa Shoes’ stores and started running a campaign on Instagram to collect customer data, drive engagement, and generate sales.
Lacing up a new experience
Here’s how Barbara Suen, M-ND’s VP of sales and business development, says the experience works: When customers walk into a Melissa Shoes store, they are greeted by a sales associate and told that they can receive a 10% discount on their purchase if they take a picture of a pair of Melissa Shoes footwear and upload it to Instagram with the hashtag #melissashoesusa.
Once customers take the picture, they can walk over to a M-ND display terminal and find their photo on the screen. Customers are then prompted to answer survey questions and provide basic data—such as their email address, shoe size, and birthday. After they enter this information, they can then email the picture to themselves and print a branded copy of it with a discount code, which they can then use in-store or online.
Levy says customers can also view Melissa Shoes’ lookbooks while interacting with the terminals to see different products. “It gives her another layer of experiencing the brand,” she says.
All of this customer data is captured by M-ND’s platform and then integrated into Melissa Shoes’ CRM system. Not only does Melissa Shoes use this data to send customers marketing emails, but Levy says the brand also uses it to identify which customers were acquired through the campaign and track their lifetime value. In addition, she can track metrics like photos processed and social reach via M-ND’s dashboard.
“I’m a very ROI-driven person,” Levy notes.
Toeing towards results
Melissa Shoes is still running the campaign; however, the brand has already seen initial results. In June, Levy said that Melissa Shoes’ conversion rate had gone up by almost a third and that the brand’s social media engagement rate, which includes factors like ‘likes’ and ‘follows,’ had grown by “about the same percentage.”
In terms of future improvements, Levy says she hopes to enhance Melissa Shoes’ data mining capabilities and experiment with different incentives. For instance, the brand is currently offering customers the chance to win a free pair of shoes when they upload a photo.
As for lessons learned from this experience, Levy says retail technology isn’t going away and that brands need to leverage it to bring that human touch.
“Technology is here to stay,” she says. “Technology is your friend.”
