Style Differences In E-Commerce Impact New Customer Acquisition

The biggest challenge, across retail / e-commerce / cataloging is the new customer challenge. Specifically, it has become really, really hard to find new customers. Expensive, too.

The thing that is most interesting to me is traffic ... there's plenty of (online) traffic ... not nearly enough retail foot traffic of course, but online, there's enough. We don't convert much of it, of course, but we try to ignore that fact, don't we?

Our creative approach to e-commerce sends a strong message to the first-time visitor who we are and what we stand for.

Take a look at this image.

Bakers has a younger-than-average customer base. When you look at the creative presentation of brand with younger-than-average customer bases, you find sparse copy and sparse product density.

How about FootSmart?

FootSmart has an older-than-average customer base. When brands have older-than-average customer bases, you observe increases in the following:

• Increased Copy.
• Increased Offers.
• Increased Product Density.
• Customer-Relevant Copy (heel pain, toe pain, bunions, corns).

Now, if you don't believe me, do the research yourself. Grab yourself a copy of the IR500 or IR Next 500, look at the demographic profiles of the brands presented, and then use your preferred device to look at the creative presentation used on the website. You'll see the same trends.

• Young = Sparse.
• Young = Imagery.
• Older = Text.
• Older = Offers.
• Older = Dense.

You pick your customer on the basis of a combination of tactics.

1. Marketing tactics (catalogs skew older, mobile skews younger).
2. Merchandise (FootSmart Bunion Relief = older, for instance).
3. Creative (dense/text = older, images = younger).

Remember, customer acquisition is the story of 2016-2020:

Customer Acquisition: The Story of 2016 - 2020 from MineThatData