Footwear icon Clarks chose Acquia to help get a holistic view of their customers so they could deliver compelling, personalized experiences.
revenue from a $500,000 campaign
increase in ROAS
A 200-year-old shoemaker and retailer, Clarks was founded in England in 1825 by brothers Cyrus and James Clark. With more than 1,000 branded stores and franchises across the globe, Clarks also sells its footwear through third-party distribution.
In order to stay current with both retail trends and changing customer expectations, Clarks’ marketing team realized that they needed a clearer understanding of their customers. But with siloed data and customer profiles across disparate channels, gaining actionable insights that could shape the company’s strategies was a difficult process. Clarks wanted a unified customer view so that they could more effectively optimize and personalize customer marketing strategies.
Like many multichannel companies, Clarks’ disconnected technology ecosystem created a host of issues; specifically, its retail POS system was unable to be connected to the company’s e-commerce order management system (OMS), leaving Clarks without a way to holistically view each of its customers. Additionally, Clarks’ marketing team knew that their “batch and blast” campaigns were far from ideal; they wanted the ability to personalize campaigns to the individual customer.
Clarks selected Acquia Customer Data Platform. Clarks employed the Acquia CDP to gather customer, product, order and behavioral data from the company’s retail POS, e-commerce OMS, email marketing and analytics systems. Leveraging Acquia CDP’s Identity Resolution Engine, which performs data hygiene, deduplication, and standardization, Clarks gained an accurate, complete view of the customer. Acquia CDP’s reporting and dashboards were used across the business, with Clarks’ marketing team using the platform’s ad-hoc analytical capabilities to drill into data on the fly. These insights allowed them to effectively deploy 1:1 campaigns that used hyper-personalization to engage customers.
Additionally, the new holistic customer view has allowed Clarks to understand which specific customers are incentivized by Clarks’ discounts; rather than blanketing all customers with discount offers, the company is now able to tailor emails and campaigns with the most relevant content, incentivizing many customers to buy without a discount. And because Acquia Customer Data Platform has helped Clarks to merge its digital and physical channels, Clarks can follow the customer journey across touchpoints, even when they browse on one device and make their purchase via a different channel. This allows Clarks to thank the customer for their recent purchase rather than continuing to show customers display ads for products they’ve already purchased—no matter the mix of channels through which they browsed and ultimately purchased.
Acquia Customer Data Platform has helped Clarks become much more customer-centric and data-driven, and the results have been significant. For example, using Acquia CDP, Clarks earmarked $500,000 for a set of campaigns which ended up generating $1.4 million in revenue, helping the marketing team exceed its year-end goal by more than $200,000 and putting them on track to double revenue the following year.
Additionally, Acquia CDP data showed Clarks the true value of their multichannel shoppers, identifying that multichannel shoppers' buying frequency was 440% higher than single-channel shoppers. And of multichannel customers who browsed online before visiting a store, 24% purchased the exact shoe they were served in a digital campaign, while 64% purchased a product from the same category as the banner they had clicked online. Being able to directly attribute an offline purchase to the specific ads a buyer interacted with online has allowed Clarks' marketing team to confidently report attribution to senior leadership, correctly allocate marketing budget to online campaigns and evaluate the correct ROAS for digital campaigns. Specifically, Clarks’ work with Acquia Customer Data Platform has led to a 5:1 increase in ROAS for paid search ads leading to clarksusa.com.
