10 MULTICHANNELNEWS
rew Clothing has plans to increase online sales by 50% this year, using the retail management solution from Futura at the heart of its multichannel offering. Online sales currently make up 22% of its overall business, which consists of its high street presence, outlet stores and monthly catalogue, as well as its e-commerce website. Futura’s key strength for Crew is its ability to manage stock, replenishment and allocations in every channel. All items are created within the Futura database and, after sale, all data returns
RYMAN MIGRATES AFFILIATE BUSINESS
UK stationery retailer, Ryman, has closed its performance advertising campaign on TradeDoubler to launch an exclusive programme with Affi liate Window. Its primary objective is to increase the profi tability of its affi liate scheme with a retail-focused recruitment drive using Affi liate Window’s industry-specifi c social platform, Darwin Marketplace to manage relationships with retail publishers and partners. Claire Theobald, Ryman head of account development, said: “While we have a good understanding of key affi liates in the offi ce supplies and stationery sector, the core focus will be on identifying new and innovative affi liate partners in the space to help grow the programme throughout 2011. Our ability to offer extremely granular reporting on programme performance will also allow us to work on category and product level optimisation strategies.”
RETAIL TECHNOLOGY MARCH/APRIL 2011
CREW AIMS TO DOUBLE WEB SALES C
back to this central point for analysis. Futura stock fi les are passed onto the web, which also gives a single view of stock availability to help Crew maximise multichannel sales and effi ciencies. The integration of databases from its three channels and all customers within Futura has recently strengthened the links between Crew Clothing’s stores, online and catalogue businesses to drive growth. Instore, sales assistants use Futura to capture customer data. This is “key to growing our customer database and increasing the effi ciency of our marketing spend – we can now allocate every sale against a customer,” according to Justin Hampshire, Crew’s fi nance director. Crew believes that faster data
capture, which is currently postcode led, could be even slicker to improve the customer experience.
“We are aiming for cost effective,
seamless, integrated multichannel offerings and Futura plays a part in this – helping us to manage stock availability across all channels so we do not miss sales from lack of supply,” he added. “We have been running Futura since we had only three stores – it has grown with us. Without Futura we would be extremely poor at stock control – the system not only gives details of where the stock itself is located, but how much it was sold for and whether it was marked down.”
LINKSHARE SUPPORTS CREW CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
Crew Clothing has boosted its customer acquisition strategy by launching an affi liate marketing programmes to infl uence and encourage customers to purchase online from the brand.
Crew Clothing selected LinkShare to identify the brand’s digital marketing needs to create a programme that would help it expand its customer base. LinkShare designed a dedicated programme that incorporated the use of voucher code sites, social media, banners and text media to help drive traffi c and increase interest in Crew Clothing’s products. As part of this process, promotions have run on voucher sites such as MyVoucherCodes, Vouchercodes. com and NetVouchercodes; as well as offers on Voucher Cloud, Money Supermarket and the Metro newspaper’s online voucher code site. After four months, the programme is already having a positive impact on
overall sales; 30-40% of affi liate orders are from new customers. In fact, the affi liate channel is acquiring the highest percentage of new customers compared to other direct channels and 5% of online sales are now coming directly through the retail channels provided by LinkShare. In addition, carefully placed promotions on voucher code sites have helped to increase customer referrals, while placements on blogs are increasing Crew Clothing’s brand exposure. Frank Sendler, online marketing manager at Crew Clothing, said: “Our affi liate
programme with LinkShare brings us closely in line with current consumer behaviour and is helping to ensure we are extending our reach online in a way that is measurable and impacts our bottom line.”
◆ E-retailers report little direct or indirect benefi t from Facebook, according to research compiled from two years of data collected by Forrester Research with
Shop.org. Social networks overall trail far behind other customer acquisition and retention tactics, like paid search and email, in generating any direct return on investment.
◆ A recent survey conducted by consultancy One iota found that many retailers are ignoring the benefi ts of mobile and social shopping, with only one in fi ve of the UK’s top 100 retailers having a mobile optimised version of their website.
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