But the biggest impact on its growth started a few ... Helped to boost revenues by 10% ... Additionally, by relocating social media links and security logos to ... checkout process and a high level of engagement with social media campaigns.
Adobe® Marketing Cloud Success Story
Brownells
Taking aim at the market Brownells Montezuma, Iowa www.brownells.com www.sinclairintl.com www.policestore.com Results • Helped to boost revenues by 10% • Increased revenue per visitor by 17% through relevant recommendations • Improved revenue per visitor by 7.8% through optimized price placement • Increased visibility into online visitor behaviors and preferences • Gained control over data collection and recommendations • Supported broader marketing strategies and objectives
Specialty retailer achieves 17% lift in revenue per visitor by optimizing shopping experiences and refining online strategies with Adobe Marketing Cloud When a mail order business selling a highly specialized inventory of over 50,000 items wants to boost sales, what can it do? It could begin by making it easier for customers to find what they’re seeking—even when some don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. It could also aim to sell customers items they didn’t specifically set out to find, by recommending a few well-chosen products—from among the tens of thousands—that will pique their interest. That’s not just mail order—that’s a tall order. But Brownells shows how it can be done. For the past 70 years, Brownells has been selling quality firearms accessories and gunsmithing tools to the firearms industry and owners through its catalog—which now weighs in at over 600 pages. Always seeking to improve sales and quality of service, the company has transformed its mail order business into a multichannel enterprise—adding both a call center and online properties to gain a larger share of the market and improve customer experiences. But the biggest impact on its growth started a few years ago, with implementation of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Today, the company’s online sales— through its main site, brownells.com, and two other affiliate sites, sinclairintl.com and policestore. com—make up more than half of all Brownells’ sales. “Adobe Marketing Cloud guides our marketing efforts, showing us how to focus our online advertising spend and product selection to make the site a more effective and profitable engine for the growth of our business,” says Jill Honken, online experience manager at Brownells. “We depend on its constant stream of real-time data to inform strategic decision making.” Brownells’ marketing team works with Adobe Marketing Cloud—aided by Adobe Consulting—which has helped improve the profitability of Brownells’ websites with marketing ideas and interpretation of data. With expert guidance and the capabilities of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Brownells can help its customers locate the products they’re looking for, learn about other relevant items, and complete purchases more easily.
Find it faster Within its specialized niche, Brownells faces stiff competition. Its reputation draws large numbers of would-be customers to the site, but to convert them, Brownells needs to make sure they quickly find what they’re looking for. Adobe Marketing Cloud revealed that search conversion rates were low—though the site aims to be helpful with a large collection of 360° images, product videos, how-to articles, and technical support, people struggled to find what they were looking for. For example, it wasn’t easy for users looking for factory replacement parts to find the schematics they needed. Amateurs, especially, often need to begin their search with images and diagrams that can help them put a name to their need. Using Adobe Marketing Cloud, Honken’s team discovered it could simplify these searches by putting a header about factory parts on a banner that appears on every page and enabling customers to click directly through to that feature of the website. That one change delivered an enormous benefit: a site-wide revenue gain of more than 10% in revenue per visitor.
With Adobe Marketing Cloud, Brownells gains insights into how users look for information. The Adobe solution enables marketers to speed visitor searches for the products they need.
“We’ll be looking to Adobe Marketing Cloud to show us what works—and just as important, what doesn’t. We credit it with having already helped us increase conversions and average order value, as well as helping grow yearover-year online sales since we adopted the Adobe solution.” Jill Honken, online experience manager, Brownells
Challenge • Improving customers’ search experiences • Recommending products for upsell and cross-sell opportunities • Increase conversion Solution Brownells and its affiliate sites use Adobe Marketing Cloud to help customers find what they’re looking for, make relevant recommendations for additional purchases, and streamline the path to conversion Systems at a glance Adobe Marketing Cloud, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target solutions. Capabilities used include: • Marketing reports & analytics • A/B/N and multivariate testing • Rules based targeting • Recommendations and crossselling • Site search/merchandising Adobe Consulting
Relevant recommendations boost revenues With more than 50,000 products in inventory, it’s not easy to pick out which few might interest a given customer. Data- and behavior-driven algorithms in Adobe Marketing Cloud generate recommendations and create a “people who bought this also bought” function, which offers complementary products and boosts sales. “Since implementing the recommendations capability within the Adobe Target solution in Adobe Marketing Cloud, we’ve seen a lift of approximately 17% in recommendations-based revenue per visitor on our PoliceStore website and a 9% lift on the Sinclair website,” says Clayton Whipple, eCommerce director at Brownells. Unlike a black-box solution for recommendations, Adobe Marketing Cloud allows Brownells to maintain maximum control over the presentation of its recommendations, as well as complete and reliable data about their effectiveness. When Brownells recently started selling ammunition on its website, it decided to use Adobe Target to apply algorithms that deduce and recommend the type of ammunition the customer is most likely to want, to get site visitors to start buying their ammunition from Brownells, too. “The advanced recommendations capabilities that the Adobe solution offers has helped to raise awareness of new products, build on existing relationships with our customers, and drive additional revenues through the website,” says Honken.
Optimizing the entire funnel Once visitors found what they were looking for—and maybe a few other items, too—Adobe Marketing Cloud revealed that they were having a hard time finding the “view cart” button to start their checkout process. The team discovered that less was more. When the Brownells team streamlined headers by removing logos, links, and other distracters, conversion increased by 1.39%, along with improved customer engagement with products. Additionally, by relocating social media links and security logos to later in the checkout process, marketers found that customers maintained the same level of confidence in the secure checkout process and a high level of engagement with social media campaigns. Brownells’ most exciting—and most profitable—discovery to date has been that when the product description shows stock status, but not pricing, at the top of the page, revenue per visitor increased by 7.8%. At the same time, Adobe Consulting proposed additional follow-up tests—calling upon its experience with other businesses and data from Adobe Marketing Cloud—and suggested testing call-out buttons on the product and search result pages. “Optimization, using Adobe solutions and leveraging the technical expertise of Adobe Consulting has been a team effort and continues to add value to our online strategies,” says Whipple. “Adobe Marketing Cloud is so intuitive to work with that marketers can, for the most part, set up tests, interpret results, and make changes on their own.”
“Since implementing the recommendations capability within the Adobe Target solution in Adobe Marketing Cloud, we’ve seen a lift of approximately 17% in recommendations-based revenue per visitor on our PoliceStore website and a 9% lift on the Sinclair website.” Clayton Whipple eCommerce director, Brownells
Metrics-driven marketing Online or offline, Brownells has always leveraged metrics to drive strategies for maximizing its revenues. For its direct marketing, the company sends out different offers to its mailing lists and measures responses. And now, for its websites, it uses Adobe Marketing Cloud to do much the same thing. In the process, it gained an unexpected bonus—data from the Adobe solution now helps guide its product experts with better information on seasonality, demand, and the differences among the websites. As a result, Brownells can better stock and promote the right products for each site, at the right time of year. Honken and her team are excited about working with Adobe Marketing Cloud to take advantage of growing areas, such as social media and mobile commerce. Brownells plans to use the solution to help it monetize the social media efforts of writers and bloggers and to gain insight into how people are using its mobile sites for each of the three brands. “We’ll be looking to Adobe Marketing Cloud to show us what works—and just as important, what doesn’t,” says Honken. “We credit it with having already helped us increase conversions and average order value, as well as helping grow year-over-year online sales since we adopted the Adobe solution.”
For more information
www.adobe.com/solutions/ digital-marketing.html
Adobe Systems Incorporated 345 Park Avenue San Jose, CA 95110-2704 USA www.adobe.com
© 2013 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
91085364 7/13
