How Gilt Groupe Engages Customers Across Multiple Mediums

Wellington Fonseca, vice president of marketing for Gilt Groupe, discussed strategies his company uses for engaging customers across multiple channels during a session at Integrated Marketing Week (imw) 2013 in New York this week.

Fonseca discussed Gilt’s key marketing challenge: How to market to its 8 million active members in more than 100 countries who communicate with Gilt in a variety of different channels, including mobile (smartphones and tablets), web (PCs) and direct mail. To offer a seamless transition between channels, Gilt must “always adjust for channel-specific format differences. Device usage also changes by time of day, so it’s crucial to be where your customers are,” Fonseca said.

Personalization is also a big part of Gilt’s marketing strategy. “We send more than 2,500 versions of personalized emails on a daily basis,” Fonseca said, adding that the key personalization drivers the company uses for these emails are shopping behavior, self-stated profiling and collaborative filtering.

Gilt also sends preference-based email alerts to specific members the night before a particular brand's sale goes live. The alerts are sent to “previous waitlisters, favoriters, and purchasers of the specific brand,” Fonseca said. The program was instituted after receiving customer feedback for it, he added.

“These brand alerts currently have a 2 percent to 5 percent conversion rate,” Fonseca said.

Website personalization is another strategy Gilt swears by. Thanks to the personalization drivers mentioned above, when specific members visit Gilt's site, at the top of the page they see a Gilt store focusing on a specific brand that they have the highest affinity for. In the middle of the page, they’ll see Gilt sales based on what they've shopped for or favored in the past. Finally, towards the bottom of the page, they see other Gilt stores ranked according to their relevancy based on their shopping behaviors. Collaborative filtering is also used to suggest specific sales.

While self-stated profiling is a key personalization enabler for Gilt, Fonseca pointed out that “brands must deliver on the expectations created by inquiring about personal preferences, or it won’t work.”

Mobile is also a big initiative for Gilt. Its most recent mobile development, Fonseca said, is the launch of customized push notifications to specific groups of mobile users’ phones. Gilt targets these groups by gender, purchase behavior, tenure, etc.

Mobile augmented reality is another tactic Gilt is leveraging. The retailer's augmented sunglasses feature provides members with the ability to virtually “try on” sunglasses in Gilt’s app. “Users can swipe to browse and see other sunglasses on themselves,” Fonseca said. “Photos can also easily be shared to Twitter and Facebook.”

Gilt’s mobile initiatives seem to be working: Currently, there have been 6 million Gilt apps downloaded, and mobile currently accounts for 30 percent to 40 percent of Gilt’s total revenue, Fonseca said.