FootSmart steps up cross selling with IBM Product Recommendations

With over 1.9 million customers, FootSmart® is the largest direct-to-consumer retailer of foot and lower body healthcare products. Through product testing, consumer input, a podiatric review process and consumer education, FootSmart has grown to become one of the top 250 internet retailers. The company now offers over 1,200 products, many of which are developed and manufactured by the company’s own researchers and specialists.

While the company relies heavily on its successful catalog channel, the primary source of growth and customer acquisition is the company’s website, FootSmart.com. The online channel is proving to be an effective vehicle for building the FootSmart brand.

Challenge
FootSmart recognized that providing related product recommendations to their online shoppers offers an excellent opportunity to increase overall sales. Because of the importance of cross sells, the company was willing to invest significant resources. The merchandising team was spending upwards of twenty hours per week identifying the appropriate cross sell products for their product detail pages, decisions that were based on hard data when it was available and on intuition and guesswork when it was not. In addition to identifying the most relevant and profitable cross sells, FootSmart needed a more efficient way to reduce their under-performers.

Solution
FootSmart worked with their IBM® Coremetrics® Business Analyst to implement IBM® Product recommendations, a closed loop solution for determining effective cross sell recommendations based on a history of online consumer behavior. IBM Product Recommendations leverages IBM® Coremetrics® LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles, the most complete and accurate source of online visitor behavior. IBM Product Recommendations’ sophisticated algorithms have taken the guesswork out of FootSmart’s cross sell offers, relying instead on the comprehensive browsing, shopping and purchasing information stored in Coremetrics LIVE Profiles. Offers are now generated automatically, resulting in more relevant cross sells and dramatic savings in merchandisers’ time.

Results
Since implementing IBM Product Recommendations, FootSmart has seen impressive results in their cross sell initiatives, including dramatic improvements in conversions, sales and average order value. Cross sells have surpassed several other categories, including search, as the most effective vehicle for driving sales.

• 147 percent increase in cross sells as a percentage of total online sales
• 31 percent increase in cross sell conversion rate
• 19 percent increase in average order value when a cross sell product was purchased
• 97 percent increase in sales for cross sell items

Additionally, FootSmart shoppers are completing their purchases after fewer product views, a direct result of having more relevant cross sell products.

As significant to FootSmart as these results have been, the positive impact on merchandiser productivity has been equally impressive. The manual creation of cross sells has been virtually eliminated, freeing up valuable merchandiser time to concentrate on new opportunities. FootSmart is now looking to expand their online cross-sell success to multichannel areas such as targeted email and call center.

For more information
To learn more about IBM Coremetrics please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/marketing-solutions