Sprinting to Stellar eCommerce: Brooks Running & Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Building a successful brand is all in the legs; it’s all about the marathon than the sprint.

Brooks Running knows that. It has hit its stride with how to interact with its customers and keeps pace with fast-moving changes in the industry. 

It not only sells high-performance sports trainers and clothing but also a lifestyle, communicating professional advice and content to its customers across 60 countries.

Cutting across all digital channels with quality content, Brooks has built a strong and agile team to keep pace with the wants and needs of runners.

They’re able to do that because they moved their ecommerce operations onto Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and have kept growing their online sales team and developed a responsive mobile website.

The new site was designed to elevate the digital experience for runners everywhere,” declared Meredith Han, senior director of global ecommerce at Brooks. “Using responsive web design, social integration, and online tools, we are able to focus on better ways to bring our products and services directly to runners, wherever they are.”

When it comes to IT, Commerce Cloud has it covered. “We can remain 100% focused on what we do best,” said Meredith, which is “high-performance running gear made by the best biomechanical experts in the field.”

Quickening performance

Ever since its partnership with Commerce Cloud, Brooks has been creating better and better digital experiences for their mobile users. And this has led to increases in customer satisfaction and site performance.

After the launch of their mobile site, they saw a double-digit increase in conversion rates when compared to the same time last year. As part of its mobile site renovation, one of its tools, the Shoe Advisor, soon became the most popular feature on the site.

“We know that Commerce Cloud will be able to grow with our business,” said Meredith, “providing best practice advice and an ecommerce platform that will help us accelerate international expansion and achieve peak market performance.”

Along with the Shoe Advisor feature, Brooks built other digital tools to help runners identify the trainers that comfortably fit their needs. For example, the Switcheroo tools lets runners find trainers by putting in information about the current trainer model they use for running.

To build stronger brand loyalty, Brooks also offers a True Blue Guarantee, which is a 30-day free return policy so that runners can test out their trainers in whatever environment they are used to running in. In addition, they have made it easier for customers to publicly share photos of their new kicks and connect with fellow Brooks runners within its running community.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform has more advanced features for Brooks to leverage. “The platform is highly adaptable,” added Meredith, “and has seamlessly powered our business growth and peaks in site traffic from day one.”

Over the last decade of working with SFCC Brooks has changed and evolved its ecommerce strategy with the help of the ecommerce platform, which “provides all the tools to deal with change,” said Meredith, “which is incredibly powerful… For example, mobile was just a blip in 2009. If you fast forward to today, it is a significant portion of our overall traffic and grows double digits year over year.”

The wider Commerce Cloud community has been an environment in which Brooks can tap into key resources with partner vendors (cough, ArganoUV,cough) as well as notes with other retailers on stuff like traffic breakdown.

“The incredibly rich client community has been a huge benefit,” said Meredith, “Leveraging benchmark data and connecting with other clients of all sizes and business models has definitely helped us from a resource and organizational standpoint.”

Into the distance

Moving forwards, Brooks is going to continue with its close digital partnership with Salesforce Commerce Cloud to boost its user experience built on deeper personalization. Next up on their do-to list is to accelerate their engagement with related experts and advanced functions to better tell their brand story.

With Commerce Cloud, Brooks can launch new ecommerce sites for new markets that reflect the local language, currency, culture, and consumer preferences. “We know that [SFCC] will be able to grow with our business,” said Meredith, “providing best practice advice and an ecommerce platform that will help us accelerate international expansion, and achieve peak market performance.”

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud experts. Contact us to see how we can work together.