Legendary Legacy
Nordstrom is a company that knows about following the game plan, no matter what. This 100-year-old retailer waited what seemed like forever, at least in the fast-paced Internet environment, to launch its Web site: It went live only last November. But with a sterling reputation for customer service in the retail and catalogue worlds, the company wanted to make sure its Internet channel wouldn't let its core customers down or turn off potential converts.
"We have to be able to treat customers the same no matter how they're coming to us, because to them, it's all Nordstrom," says Kathryn Olson, Nordstrom.com's executive vice president of marketing. "We're very conscious of our responsibility to our customers and to the Nordstrom brand."
Toward that end, Nordstrom has deployed an online marketing strategy that is all about integration. For starters, the store's URL is plastered on every catalogue and piece of marketing collateral, and online shoppers get an early crack at retail-store sales.
The bargain bell gongs at midnight on the Web. But perhaps most important, the company is committed to offering the same breadth of selection on its site that is available through its other channels. Just consider footwear alone: Some 30 million pairs of shoes are up for grabs online. And as is always the case with Nordstrom, customer convenience is paramount. That means online shoppers can return or exchange any wrong-footed shoe purchase at the closest retail store or through the mail.
The same tie-it-all-together approach applies to the company's technology choices. Though Nordstrom.com has a relatively conservative set of features compared with some sites, chief technology officer Paul Onnen says a solid, reliable site is more important than flash that crashes. As a result, heavy-duty personalisation won't surface until next year, and the site will be in lockdown by early October for the holiday season.
And as with the marketing side of the business, customer-centricity is a driver here as well. All customer and order data captured by the Web site, which is running entirely on a Microsoft platform and Microsoft products, is delivered each day to the company's internal network. It is then cleaned up and correlated with existing customer records.
Like drugstore.com, Nordstrom has designed its own set of tools to assist with segmenting and analysing the customer data. In addition, shoppers who order on the site can opt to receive email updates, which are created from scratch by the internal marketing team and passed off to a series of list servers. Though Olson and Onnen were coy when it came to doling out specific numbers regarding Nordstrom.com, they did say the average online order is US$150, which is high for the industry.
Thanks to its long history, Nordstrom is all too familiar with the behind-the-scenes work necessary to keep customers fat and happy. But even companies that have been focused almost exclusively on the buzz are getting back to the basics of analysis and strategic marketing -- with an Internet twist.
In the early days of e-commerce, all of a company's up-front efforts were focused on driving as many people as possible to the Web site. Now the emphasis is on keeping those people coming back. Jill Frankle, director of retail e-commerce for Gomez Advisors, says, "That's going to be very good for the customer and for the retailers themselves."
It should make the market happy as well. You gotta love a win-win-win.
