Communication Conversions: How a Shoe Brand Sized Up & Boosted its Conversions

The homonym-filled athletic shoe brand NOBULL has been filling its boots lately after utilizing marketing and personalization tech to boost its numbers of repeat shoppers. 

By boosting repeat shoppers, NOBULL has managed to increase its conversion rates and repeat buyer rates, and ultimately strengthen its loyal customer base. 

Its history doesn’t stretch too far back. The online-based brand was launched back in 2015 and first focused on the exercise and training community while now being rolled out to cater to runners, cyclists, and golfers. 

“We’ve been growing rapidly as quickly as we can since we started,” said Todd Meleney, the CMO of NOBULL. “When you’re an inventory-based business, the growth limitations are due to inventory constraints. 

“During COVID-19 with retail stores closed, we had even more wind in our sails that allowed us to continue the accelerated growth that hasn’t slowed down since.”

The style of NOBULL is to provide new styles that tend to sell out pretty quickly. Yet it also caters to shoppers with specific interests. Being able to provide everything for different groups of customers would be difficult yet necessary in order to be successful. 

“As we scaled,” added Todd, “we saw we have various segments of our audience that all connect with our brand message and have different interests. When you’re communicating directly with the customer, the relationship you have is intimate, so the days of universal messaging is long gone.” 

NOBULL’s online practices are powered by the ecommerce platform Shopify and integrate the brand’s customer data that it collects to provide better personalized digital experiences. 

This means that a new digital shopper who enters the site will see and navigate one homepage while a returning customer will see a personalized homepage full of product recommendations based on their browser history and purchase history. 

What the brand did was carry out some good old A/B testing to determine what to showcase on the site as well as the navigation of the site. 

Personalizing 

Thanks to its development efforts with personalizing digital journeys, NOBULL recorded an increase of 30% in its predicted customer lifetime value as well as an increase of 46% in its repeat-buyer rate during the first 6 months. 

Building out broader personalization capabilities, NOBULL is now able to expand its emails to include cart-abandonment emails with a more defined audience selection as well as behavioral triggers like browse abandonment. 

“When we tried to do triggers like browse-abandonment previously, we ended up turning them off because people got angry when they saw things that were no longer available,” said Joy Huang, director of loyalty and retention marketing at NOBULL.

“And we did have a back-in-stock flow, but we couldn’t automate it, so that was a manual batch send each time.” 

In addition, it is able to automate other messages including when product is out of stock. When a shopper now sees that something is out of stock, it triggers an onsite message which allows the shopper to request a notification for when the product is back in stock. 

Thanks to these back-in-stock notifications, NOBULL saw a sizable 15.5% increase in conversion rates. 

“If you’re not paying attention to the interests and behaviors of the consumer,” added Todd, “it will create a longer path of conversion to get them there. 

“Without a personalized path to conversion, they are going to have to find their way through our products on their own. But the ability to bring them in based on what they want from us makes it a more seamless experience.” 

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading digital products & experiences consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.