Visitor Identification Platform Engages Shoppers & Drives Sales

A window into who was visiting its website helped Smith & Noble boost its customer acquisition program.

Challenge

Smith & Noble is a custom window treatment company that’s been selling direct for over twenty-five years. As a catalog marketer that now relies heavily on its website as a storefront, converting website traffic into sales is essential. But with only about three percent of daily visitors making a purchase, the company was falling short of its sales goals.

“The Merkle relationship has been so successful that we plan to expand our triggered lightbox program beyond Welcome emails. We also plan to implement more sophisticated campaigns targeted to specific consumers, which will generate more in – home appointments and help us achieve our ultimate goal of driving sales.”

Andrew Sampson

Digital Marketing Manager, Smith & Noble

Approach

To better engage website visitors and transform shoppers into buyers, Smith & Noble turned to Merkury's Consumer Insights & Interaction Hub™.

Smith & Noble realized that this customer knowledge — including visitor identification and subsequent tracking of when and how customers visited the website, how long they stayed, and what they shopped for — could be used to strengthen customer acquisition and better convert website visits into sales.

Implementing Merkury's Triggered Lightbox and Triggered Email services was easy, with Merkle seamlessly establishing an API integration with Smith & Noble’s email service provider. Smith & Noble now uses personalized lightboxes to drive sales via optimized visitor experiences and exclusive offers for identified visitors. Visitors who can’t be identified (and those who can be identified but haven’t signed up for email) receive special offers to capture their email address and instantly receive a follow-up “Welcome” email.

Results

50%

Lift in customer acquisition program

Keys to success

Data feeds - Mercury was already providing data feeds on website traffic, which Smith & Noble used to refine its offline segmentation strategies and optimize ROI for catalog mailings.
Triggered Lightboxes - Smith & Noble can easily alter its lightboxes and emails when developing new, and/or updating, existing campaigns, making it easy for the retailer to stage one-day sales or offers of varying duration in line with whatever its marketing calendar requires.