A Step Ahead

You want fries with that?

Ah, the classic cross sell: offering customers something that complements perfectly what they’ve already expressed an interest in buying. It’s easy to do when they’re standing in front of your cash register, obviously hungry, harried and in a mood to supersize. But when you sell on the Web, you have to make sure that your point of sale — that is, your product or landing page — is properly decked out with the cross-selling offers that will resonate with each specific customer based on his or her browsing behavior.

FootSmart, a retailer of foot and lower-body healthcare products via catalog and the Web, found itself in a bind managing its cross-selling opportunities on its Web site’s product pages. The company sells more than 1,000 items for comfort, health and pain relief, from shoes and hosiery to back supports and bunion protectors.

When customers came to the Web site and shopped around, FootSmart had real estate set up on the product pages to show other items that might interest them. But the firm had two problems: a lack of real insight regarding what customers were most likely to buy when they were cross sold, and the time it took FootSmart’s online merchandising team to set up those ads by hand, according to Sarah Bowler, the company’s senior manager of e-retail.

“We wanted to leverage shopping data for these cross-selling opportunities to move away from a really manual operation for our team,” she says. “Also, we were going more on gut instinct than on hard data when it came to choosing products for cross selling.”

FootSmart was already using Coremetrics Web analytics technology to monitor shopper behavior on its site, tagging the data and applying it in decisions about what to cross sell and where. But the team knew there still was a significant time lag between receiving that data from the Coremetrics application and making use of it in building the product detail pages, Bowler says.

So FootSmart was particularly interested when offered the chance to beta test Intelligent Offer, a feature of the Coremetrics 2007 platform that automates the selection and placement of cross-selling offers on product pages.

Intelligent Offer uses a proprietary algorithm to understand behavior on a Web site and select the items customers are most disposed to be interested in, says Matt Lawson, Coremetrics’ director of product marketing. And it’s more sophisticated than the feature Amazon.com has made so familiar, stating that customers who bought one thing also bought something else.

Coremetrics now sends a feed of recommended cross sells every morning built on the most recent visitor behaviors, and FootSmart applies that feed to the site, Bowler says. And FootSmart is able to apply its own customized business rules to the feed.

For example, if there are not enough cross-sell items to fill the four slots on a given page, the software will default to a category that FootSmart selects, usually top-selling products in a category. That’s especially important in shoe sales, where new styles and seasonal products may not have any behavioral data in the Coremetrics system.

The feed also is linked to inventory information (to make sure FootSmart isn’t cross selling things that are on back order) and to a clearance feed (so the company doesn’t wind up offering a reduced-price item as a cross sell on a regular-priced product page).

FootSmart started deploying the Coremetrics Intelligent Offer feature in April and Bowler says the impact was noticeable almost immediately. For one thing, automating the process spared her merchandising team the 20 hours per week they’d been spending manually identifying and applying cross-sell products.

It also relieved them of the task of checking product pages by hand to make sure they were fully optimized for cross selling. FootSmart’s Web site wasn’t designed to notify the merchandising team when a product dropped out of inventory or was removed from the online offering, Bowler says. That left gaps in the cross-selling spaces that could persist for days before they were found and filled. Intelligent Offer makes sure those spaces get filled right away.

That alone moved the needle — in fact, the increases began to build once the more relevant suggestions took effect, Bowler adds. To date, FootSmart has seen a 147% increase in cross sales.

The Coremetrics 2007 platform went into general launch last month, offering online users access to Intelligent Offer and other new Web-based applications for a premium monthly fee, based typically on the number of page views, on top of the cost of the basic Web analytics package.

Another new analytics application, Real Time Monitor, offers marketers a look at the broad range of performance data from marketing campaigns and Web site changes in terms of both products and revenue. Armed with this unified dashboard view of their marketing efforts, DMers can optimize campaigns in real time based on performance indicators they’ve customized themselves.

Lawson says some of the application’s beta testers have put plasma TVs in their offices to display these real-time sales metrics around the clock. One multichannel retailer with a presence on TV and the Web is using the system to track e-commerce activity immediately after a TV message has aired, dropping the broadcast message if it doesn’t generate enough interest online.