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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific
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Paths to Retail Success
January 20, 2010
In the lead up to Christmas retailers implemented varied strategies and tactics to deliver buyers to their online stores, some with outstanding success.
What stands out is that there’s more than one way to thrive online, and not just one strategy that should be implemented across the board for retailers to achieve success.
Each retailer and their customer base is different and react to different and multiple marketing stimuli. To highlight this I reviewed three of the top retailers brandsExclusive (www.brandsexclusive,com.au), EziBuy (www.ezibuy.com.au) and Threadless (www.threadless.com) in the Shopping and Classified – Apparel and Accessories industry (week ending 19/12/2009) and how they garnered website traffic in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2009
When each website peaked in market share differed leading into Christmas, as did how they generated their traffic. By reviewing the upstream clickstream data from the individual websites we are able to see the differences in strategy.
brandsExclusive, an invitation only website promising heavy discounts on fashion and designer brands, share of visits peaked pre Christmas during the week ending 19 December 2009. The clickstream chart below depicts the heavy industry influence of the Shopping and Classifieds – Rewards and Directories and Computers and Internet – Paid to Surf, reflecting a strong push of visitors from the website Rewards Central. Email Services, while declining in comparison closer to Christmas, was also a major contributor to the website’s success.
EziBuy has developed a strong customer base over many years as one of Australia’s most popular online Apparel and Accessory websites. From mid-November Email Services drove EziBuy’s share of traffic and was the most prominent driver of visits to EziBuy when it hit its peak during the week ending 12/12/2009. Search Engines and Social Networking and Forums also contributed strongly to their EziBuy’s pre Christmas campaign.
Threadless is a t-shirt website that relies upon contributors for designs and has developed a strong community, so it is no surprise that they have been able to leverage this community through social media websites. During the week of Christmas (week ending 26 December 2009) Social Networking and Forums websites were responsible for 67.7% of upstream visits to Threadless.
Facebook was the leading driver of traffic to Threadless represented 63.5% of all traffic from Social Networking and Forums. Threadless have an active community within Facebook with over 104,000 fans of their brand and combined with display advertising delivered a strong outcome pre Christmas.
As we have seen here these three leading Apparel and Accessories websites each had a different path to success over the crucial pre Christmas retail period:
· brandsExclusive – Rewards and Directories / Paid to Surf.
· EziBuy – Email Services
· Threadless – Social Networking and Forums.
There is no absolute strategy or tactic to apply for success, but through testing, meaningful measurement, benchmarking against competitors and by understanding the variety of strategies being applied you can apply a set of tactics or overall strategies that will best engage and activate your customers online.
How do your competitors drive their marketing online?
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Posted by Alan Long at 09:29 AM
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Comments
Interesting that threadless peaked on the 26th december, perhaps a bit late to deliver products before christmas ?
Posted by jimbo | January 29, 2010 07:51 AM
What you can't see in the threadless data is that all t-shirts, site wide, were $10 on boxing day (26 Dec), the point being that the source of the referrals is only half the picture. The message, $10 t-shirts, is the other half, and is quite critical to understanding the data.
Posted by Dan | January 30, 2010 10:21 AM
Dan, you're quite right that the appeal of a specific message / offer is a determining factor.
The point I was making is that while companies have many different paths to communicate those offers effectively, Threadless have been able to harness Social Networks to get immediate response to offers.
Thanks for commenting.
Alan
Posted by Alan Long | February 1, 2010 09:13 AM
HI
Great information in this post and the leading driver of traffic to thread less represented 63.5% of all traffic from Social Networking and Forums.
Posted by Online Auction | January 21, 2010 08:07 PM