Matalan
The word of retail is a fickle industry based on fashion trends, purchase habits and constantly changing customers tastes. Matalan, a UK based, retail company knows this better than anyone else. This company was the darling retail company of the 1980's and 1990's. The company had high end fashion at economical prices - it was the beginning of the "discounter" customer.
Below is a TV advertisement for Matalan, featuring their Christmas inventory:
For years, Matalan was unchallenged in the sector. However similar modeled retail stores began to spring up around Matalan, WalMart and Tesco, and their hold on the market began to loosen. The company made poor marketing choices, did not have stock to meet demand and poor choices on increasing prices - drove stock prices down.
What is interesting about this company is that it was able to pull itself out of the hole and negative brand image to become more profitable through a variety of tactics: strengthened it's brand, maintained the original price points while still reinforcing the great strengths of the products, created more fashionable lines and built partnerships with more contemporary brands and fashion. (Jardine, 2004) One example of this change in 2013 was the launch of the Intersport Sporting Pro brand, an athletic apparel line focused on women, capitalizing on the athletic wear as contemporary wear trend. (Breakfast briefing, 2013)
Along with these rebranding choices, Matalan utilized online analytics to bring about these positive changes. First, Malatan has a brick and mortar store, and an e-commerce website that is an extension of the store offering the entire catalogue to online customers. In order to make this e-commerce website effective and successful, Matalan looked for an analytics platform that would streamline the processing of data, save time in processing and distributing data, provide insights to market trends and generally delivery quality data about the effectiveness of the site that would determine the trajectory of the website. Enter Google Analytics!
In order to this, Malatan hired Morpheus Media to implement DoubleClick Campaign Manager, a Google program that assists companies in managing their online ads and ad serving. This program has a dashboard that shows reports from websites and mobile, including "ad serving, targeting, verification, reporting, and attribution modeling." - a program that gives oversight to the entire online advertising campaigns. This centralized display of their digital marketing gave Matalan a new perspective on their e-commerce website. According to Adam McCann, Online Search & Affiliate Assistant for Matalan:
"This gives us the ability to see the hidden power of different channels. One of the most interesting things about the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration has been around assisted conversions. It’s really helpful to be able to see one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel."
Matalan also began to utilize Google Analytics Premium to analyze the successes and room for improvement of their digital advertising and goal conversions. Lee Pinnington, Matalan's Multi-Channel Marketing Director, commented:
“One of the great things about Google Analytics Premium is that the processing power is much quicker. That’s useful in making real-time decisions on things that can impact us that day. It’s also really helpful to be able to see one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel. The move to Google Analytics Premium means we are able to unlock data that we can trust with minimal resource to drive real-time decisions. UK retailers are very elastic businesses; we need to get data and make decisions to target our user base quickly with promotional activity to grow our sales."
More specifically, Matalan found the functionality of capturing unsampled data, quick access to data and the opportunity of 50 Customer Variables in Google Analytics to be extremely helpful. Due to this functionality, Matalan was able to make many positive changes to their website:
1. Created a portal to search for products, so that Matalan could capture the data on what the customers were searching for and could not find on the website.
2. Implemented a "Forgot Password Funnel" for customers. This was created to help in the coversion process, in case the customer forgot their password in the check out process.
3. Use the report, virtual pageviews, to understand where potential drop off points were and why.
4. Compared anonymous and registered visitors by utilizing the event function in Google Analtics and create a Quick Shop ID code and user type.
5. Utilized custom variables to view product success through the shopping cart page
6. Created reports specific to the landing page to understand potential downfalls in their digital marketing plan
This combination of DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Google Analytics Premium gave workable insights to Matalan on how to use their marketing tactics more effectively. Utilizing these two platforms together, Matalan can perform more analyses across various platforms, can create new marketing plans much faster, follow traffic and device sources, sales, conversions, and was able to identify which products were viewing well and what products or pages that were not viewing well. The end results were s a 28% rise in conversion rate, with a tremendous spike in site visits and revenue.
Resources:
Breakfast briefing: Retail news on matalan and spar UK.(2013). Retail Week, Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1425297478?accountid=2837
Google (n.d). DS OVERVIEW: DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM). Google Support. Retrieved on March 1, 2015 from: https://support.google.com/ds/answer/3437333?hl=en
Google Analytics (n.d.) Matalan: After implementing Google Analytics Premium, Matalan sees a 28% increase in conversion rate. Retrieved on March 1, 2015 from: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/analytics/customers/pdfs/matalan.pdf
Jardine, A. (2004, Jun 23). Matalan. Marketing, , 24. Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com/docview/214972781?accountid=2837
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