Nine West Group, Inc., the women's apparel retailer, is rolling out a database integration project. But don't expect it to do it by the book. The firm has a history of doing things cheaply, and following its own lead.
For example, when Nine West decided to get into e-mail ten months ago, it rejected several e-mail vendors because their systems were built on "real-time triggers" and Web activity, said Dianne Binford, director of customer-intelligence for Nine West.
"How short-sighted can you be?" asked Binford, speaking at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference in Rosemont, IL. "It should be based on multiple channels."
It also should be based on online registration. Nine West tried an e-mail append, but it "failed miserably," Binford said. "We appended close to 50%, but half were not deliverabe."
But Nine West’s e-mail works. Nine West achieves an e-mail open rate of 60% to 75%, and a higher sales conversion rate with e-mail than it does with paper postcards and catalogs. One e-mail program, generated a 28% click-through rate with an e-mail for Marie Claire’s Hot Summer Trends.<>p> And its database has cost remarkably little, although that probably will change now as the company integrates the register data from two chains, Easy Spirit and Nine West, which have 200 stores apiece, and moves from a flat file to a relational file. However, Web and customer service data will be left out. "We can’t do it all," Bindford said.
The company’s first database was created for its Easy Spirit chain in 1993. But it hardly provided real-time turnaround of data to the point of purchase.
"We registered key information at the point of sale, then an MIS person gathered on a monthly basis before sending it to the database vendor," said Binford. And that wasn’t the only delay.
But the firm continued with its approach. Three years ago, the Nine West division decided it wanted in. It sent its data in the same formats to the same MIS person. The one-time set-up cost was $500, plus licensing fees.
What’s more, the first mailing pieces "more than recovered all of the costs, and got total management support for the effort," Binford said.
And when the firm went on the Web, "we went to the same person in MIS in identical format. This time it cost $250 to implement," Binford said. (Of course, in that instance the firm also did a one-time reverse append of credit cards used more than once.)
What did it do when the Easy Spirit and Nine West chains decided they needed more, specialized data?
"Getting the brands segregated was a major challenge," Bindord said. "The vendor offered to rebuild the database." But that wasn’t necessary: In the end, the vendor simply added fields, which took only weeks.
Sometimes, the firm’s database marketing succeeded only through "brute force," and "manual, messy, time-intensive projects," Binford said. But she admitted, "I can’t describe the disaster that would have resulted [of having two channels on one database] without the manual experience."
In the end, she said, "it’s all about data feeds, getting it all into one place to give you a 360 degree view. Don’t let it sit there--replicate it back to those sources, and give them the view."
However, she warned, "it’s like a field of land mines."
