Famous Footwear steps up multi-channel sales with web analytics
With rising competition from pure-play online shoe retailers, Famous Footwear is using web analytics to monitor customer response to multi-channel marketing and identify hot trends. Sales are up 15-20% for products identified in trends, Bill Bledsoe, manager of e-commerce, tells Internet Retailer..
“The web allows us to identify and react to trends, helping our overall online sales and to some extent in stores, too,” he says.
Famous Footwear, a unit of Brown Shoe Co. Inc. that operates 930 stores and FamousFootwear.com, uses HBX analytics software from WebSideStory Inc. to monitor and analyze how shoppers are using its web site. “We get a good picture in real time of what products and categories shoppers are visiting and what they’re buying,” Bledsoe says.
Famous Footwear analyzes web traffic right after it distributes its weekly printed advertising circulars in stores and newspapers. “We expect to see an online sales boost from the circulars,” Bledsoe says. The circulars prominently display references to FamousFootwear.com.
And if a particular product featured in the circulars is getting a large amount of online traffic, Famous Footwear will re-work its online merchandising to display it and related products more prominently, producing even larger sales, Bledsoe says. At the same time, Bledsoe will forward data on online buying trends to stores, so they can also take advantage of real-time data to emphasize displays of hot-selling products. “It all comes back to using web analytics,” he says.
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