Kicking Up Online Sales

Shoebuy.com, one of the largest online retailers of footwear and accessories, is taking another step toward improving the shopping experience.

Last September Shoebuy.com, which boasts more than 1.5 million visitors a month, began using SaaS testing and segmenting services from Amadesa. Specifically, Shoebuy.com used Amadesa’s A/B & multivariate testing along with its segmentation solutions.

In the decade since its inception, Shoe buy.com has formed partnerships with more than 1,000 manufacturers, offering more than 800,000 products: sandals, boots and shoes for the whole family, plus apparel, bags and accessories. That sets up quite a bit of finger-walking through Shoebuy.com’s merchandise-rich website.

Shoebuy.com was the first e-retailer in its segment to offer free shipping and free returns, along with a 100 percent price guarantee. It’s rated one of the top e-tailers in the country for outstanding service by BizRate, one of only two companies to win the award six years in a row. As a result, it has been quite successful in attracting repeat customers, engaging them online long enough to complete millions of transactions, all of which has helped the company achieve double-digit sales growth for 10 consecutive holiday seasons.

Metrics have long driven Shoebuy.com’s marketing initiatives, so it’s not surprising that the company continues to step up its game by extracting more data to create better personalized customer experiences. Amadesa’s rich feature set, use and integration ease were important considerations in selecting the Evanston, Ill.-based IT company’s solutions.

Testing optimizations
Amadesa’s Customer Experience Suite offers end-to-end testing and personalization products to help maximize revenues, enhance customer engagement, increase conversions and improve marketing ROI. Its A/B & multivariate testing solutions allow Shoebuy.com to identify which alternative images, text, offers, navigational components or other elements drive customer engagement. Shoe buy.com is able to create rules to serve the most relevant content to predefined segments, resulting in optimized visits and improved conversion rates.

Whether the customer enters the site from a search engine, banner ad or pay-per-click keyword, she will be welcomed with the most relevant, appropriate and consistent message and then routed to the page of the specific product she was looking for.

“We’re big believers in running things by the numbers and in letting our customers tell us what they like,” says James Keller, Shoebuy.com’s senior vice president of marketing. “We’ve always been very active in testing on the site and in our marketing programs.”

Amadesa’s solutions allowed Shoe buy.com to test more optimizations, allowing even greater insight. This has “allowed us to build customer loyalty to the point that repeat sales make up nearly 65 percent of revenue,” Keller says.

Results vary quite a bit from test to test, “But overall, Amadesa was able to prove its value very quickly,” he says. “The company facilitates our ability to test in ways that make it very easy and efficient, and we always have multiple tests in the market.”

Amadesa captures performance results specific to each test segment, and then breaks each segment down further by various geographic, demographic and behavioral traits. “Not only can we see the results of each optimization overall,” Keller says, “but how it affects each sub-segment.”