Melissa Shoes, known for its plastic footwear, struggled to get customers to return to its stores and engage after an initial visit.
“Previously, when a consumer walked out the door, our engagement with them ended,” explained Michele Levy, CEO of Melissa Shoes’ parent company and distributor Ilhabela Holdings.
Levy wanted to find a way to re-engage these customers, learn more about them, and get them to return to the store to ultimately drive conversion, leveraging channels customers already use and that allow them to express themselves.
In April, she installed M-ND’s interactive display terminals in Melissa Shoes’ stores and started running a campaign on Instagram to collect customer data, drive engagement, and generate sales.
Lacing up for something new
Barbara Suen, M-ND’s VP of sales and business development, detailed the new consumer experience: When customers walk into a Melissa Shoes store, they are greeted by a sales associate and told they can receive a 10% discount on their purchase if they take a picture of a pair of Melissa Shoes footwear and upload it to Instagram with the hashtag #melissashoesusa.
Once customers take the picture, they can walk over to a M-ND display terminal and find their photo on the screen. Customers are then prompted to answer survey questions and provide basic data — such as their email address, shoe size, and birthday. After they enter this information, they can then email the picture to themselves and print a branded copy of it with a discount code, which they can then use in-store or online.
Levy said customers can also view lookbooks while interacting with the terminals to see different products. “It gives her another layer of experiencing the brand,” she said. All of this customer data is captured by M-ND’s platform and then integrated into Melissa Shoes’ CRM system. Not only does the brand use this data to send customers marketing emails, but Levy said they also use it to identify which customers were acquired through the campaign and track their lifetime value. In addition, she can track metrics like photos processed and social reach via M-ND’s dashboard.
“I’m a very ROI-driven person,” Levy noted.
Toeing toward results
Melissa Shoes is still running the campaign; however, the brand has already seen initial results. In June, Melissa Shoes’ conversion rate had gone up by almost a third and that the brand’s social media engagement rate, which includes factors like ‘likes’ and ‘follows,’ had grown by “about the same percentage.”
In terms of future improvements, Levy said she hopes to enhance Melissa Shoes’ data mining capabilities and experiment with different incentives. For instance, the brand was recently offering customers the chance to win a free pair of shoes when they uploaded a photo.
As for lessons learned from this experience, Levy added that brands need to leverage retail technology to bring that human touch.
