Clarks Achieves One View Of The Customer

By Erin Harris, Editor-In-Chief, Cell & Gene
Follow Me On Twitter @ErinHarris_1

January 2017 Innovative Retail Technologies

Via a customer data and engagement solution, the iconic shoemaker personalizes the shopping journey and achieves a 360-degree view of the customer.

Clarks, the 200-year-old shoemaker and retailer, was faced with a disconnected technology ecosystem. The organization was unable to understand its customers in a way that allowed for optimal customer marketing strategies. The time, money, and resources needed both internally and externally to implement a larger marketing cloud with a number of products required either heavy integration or a large marketing service provider. Clarks didn’t view either of these as options. “We needed a partner with an all-in-one technology that could solve our data silo issues and unite our customer profiles across all channels and provide actionable insights to inform and shape our strategies,” explains Kylie Beals, director of performance marketing, e-commerce at Clarks. “We needed a campaign management tool that could optimize our marketing spend and orchestrate more personalized customer experiences across all our marketing channels.”

Indeed, Clarks’ biggest problem was that its retail POS system could not be connected to the company’s e-commerce order management system (OMS) in order to provide a holistic, accurate view of the Clarks customer. Beals explains that after conducting an RFP, Clarks selected AgilOne, a marketing cloud vendor that provides an enterprise-grade customer data and engagement hub. “After having implemented AgilOne, Clarks has a complete view of its customers across all channels,” says Beals. “We’ve connected our retail POS with online customers who are browsing and making purchases, and we’ve orchestrated personalization across channels,” says Beals. “Clarks is now able to extract customer data and combine information from CRM systems.”

Specifically, Clarks utilizes AgilOne’s 360 Profile, which combines customer, order, product, and behavioral data from the retail POS, e-commerce OMS, Bronto, and Google Analytics to provide an accurate and complete view of the customer. By running a hygiene process (i.e., address standardization, email validation, etc.) and deduplication, Clarks achieves the all-important singular customer view. AgilOne’s reports and dashboards allow Clarks to automate and create ad-hoc customer analytics. And AgilOne Actions allows Clarks to send hyperpersonalized and segmented email campaigns with one-to-one personalization. “We can also leverage easy-to-build web recommendation containers, send lists to stores for clienteling, pull lists for direct mail campaigns, and more,” says Beals.

Improving Clarks’ Customer Experience
“Retail has been very discount driven; however, many customers are not incentivized by discounts related to Clarks’ newest products,” says Beals. “It’s important to understand these key customer differences when sending our emails. Rather than granting discounts to everyone, we are now able to focus on relevancy, which enabled us to tailor our emails to each Clarks customer.”

Clarks avoids disjointed customer experiences by merging digital and physical channels. Many retailers send cart or browse abandonment emails and follow customers across display networks after they’ve viewed products. However, many customers browse on one device and make the purchase on another, or browse online from their smartphone while shopping in the store. Clarks customers who browsed earlier in the day typically go on to make the purchase via another device or through another channel. “Instead of sending irrelevant emails or following the customer around the internet displaying products they’ve already bought with an off er they didn’t take advantage of in the first place, we thank them for their recent purchase,” says Beals. “By doing this, we create a more personalized customer experience that may lead to their next purchase.”