Industry Eye: Prospecting - Heels.com Gets a Step Ahead With Buyer Acquisition Tool

Online women's shoes retailer Heels.com tired of the spotty return on investment traditional online acquisition tools — namely display ads — were yielding the brand. So it turned to a new technology from online advertising company Permuto to attract new customers profitably online.

Permuto's buyer acquisition tool uses a database populated with over 65 million consumers' online shopping activities and histories with millions of individual products to model real-time purchase intent. With roughly 42 percent of the U.S. online shopping population accounted for, Heels.com was able to identify consumers with strong purchase intent for their products and connect to them via highly relevant, product-specific visual offers within display ads.

"By truly understanding consumer intent via our buyer index and automating the delivery of relevant product offers via our performance-based acquisition channel, we've created a way for retailers to finally
leverage the previously untapped reach and impact of display as an effective, profitable revenue stream," said Shaukat Shamim, CEO of Permuto, in a company press release.

Heels.com's results back up Shamim's claims: By using Permuto's technology, Heels.com generated a 379 percent improvement over its traditional display advertising campaign tests. In fact, Permuto's tool generated a return on ad spend within 3 percent of Heels.com's search efforts, which is usually a more effective online prospecting channel for the brand.

Eric McCoy, CEO of Heels.com, said Permuto "has been able to help us discover and re-engage consumers who are already interested in specific products on our shelves and deliver highly effective offers that get us much closer to the holy grail of one-to-one advertising."