How analytics drives holiday planning at NapaStyle.com
When looking forward to the holiday shopping season, some online retailers are betting their smartest move will be to first look back. Web analytics data from provider Coremetrics gathered over last year’s holiday season guided many of the decisions about marketing and site improvements put in place for this year’s season, Feather Hickox, director of e-commerce at NapaStyle.com, tells Internet Retailer.
For example, the decision to make adjustments to some functional areas of the site, such as parts of the checkout process, was driven in part by what last year’s data showed. “We looked at what were some of the conversion barriers and pain points on the site, and worked with Coremetrics to identify drop-off points where customers were falling out. Then we did a quick round of usability testing to prioritize fixing the things we found in analytics,” says Hickox.
Having information regarding the year-ago promotional data also helped resolve another question about when to time a promotion on the site. Hickox had originally considered a major promotion for the holiday’s peak shopping weekend online, the first weekend in December, but a review of last year’s data showed that the site’s fulfillment system has been operating at near-top capacity at that time—without the additional lift that would be contributed by a big promotion.
“So we had to re-think the timing of the promotion – maybe it didn’t make sense to do it then,” says Hickox. The retailer switched plans for the promotion to the post-Thanksgiving weekend, and Hickox says that, strategically, that will work even better. “We can use the promotion then as a way to capture more e-mail sign-ups, then as we get into those peak weeks, we have more people on our list we can contact and convert,” she says.
Hickox adds that the ongoing compilation of site analytics also will serve a role after the holiday is over—to find out if the decisions the retailer made in holiday planning worked. “We’ll look to Coremetrics to help us determine the effectiveness of what we do—by benchmarking, identifying the issues, then seeing whether or not we have resolved them,” she says.
NapaStyle.com is the online arm of the multi-channel retail operation founded by celebrity chef Michael Chiarello.
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