By Alicia Orr
With all of the excitement of the Internet in the past few years, some catalogers have forgotten the most basic rule of direct marketing; that it must first focus on providing customer satisfaction. One company that has not forgotten this is The Mark Group, the Boca Raton, FL-based company that publishes the Boston Proper, Charles Keath and Mark, Fore & Strike catalogs. As company CEO Michael Tiernan projected a year and a half ago: "As e-commerce evolves... ultimately success is not dependent on Web traffic, click-through rates or market capitalization, but on earning customer trust on every single transaction."
Today, a top goal for Tiernan and his management team is to create a pleasurable and seamless customer shopping experience on the Web.
The Mark Group believes in the future of the Internet and has big Web plans for the future. Currently, Boston Proper generates more than 15 percent of its total sales via the Web. "We project that more than 45 percent of our business will be conducted over the Internet within three to four years," says Seth Miller, chief operating officer. "Our whole business strategy is to serve the large baby boomer demographic and make shopping effortless and convenient for our customers. We saw that the baby boomers were adapting quickly to technology. Through the Web, we felt that there was an opportunity to reduce mailings and phone orders and that some of our customers might even favor the Web."
A "Toe in the Water" Test
When it was time to test the Web waters, The Mark Group took what it terms a "toe in the water" approach. "We believed that the Boston Proper customer was our most likely customer for the Web, due to its demographics," says Miller. "So, we opted not to start with the Boston Proper Web site, and instead, learn in a lower volume environment with Mark, Fore & Strike [a customer with a bit older demographic, Baby Boomer/New Senior, than that of Boston Proper]."
The very first site for The Mark Group was a static site for Mark, Fore & Strike, which made its debut in December 1998. The site was essentially an electronic order form without any real-time inventory capabilities. Mark, Fore & Strike shoppers reacted favorably to the site during a four-month assessment period that included three months of online selling. "This exercise gave us an indication that it was worth investing further in this medium," says Miller.
Next the company launched sites for Charles Keath and Boston Proper on the same basic platform. "We then reversed our strategy," explained Miller. "For the more dynamic Web site upgrade, we decided to start with Boston Proper first."
All Systems Go for Boston Proper
To move toward a more dynamic site, according to Miller, the first step was to purchase a base e-commerce package and have it fully customized. The Mark Group chose software and integrated it with the company's back-end systems, including CommercialWare's retail.dot.commerce. "The Web site was integrated real-time into fulfillment software, so that regardless of whether an order comes in via phone, mail or Web, it is processed into one system," explains Scott Bryant, vice president, operations. "This makes order handling seamless and makes it easy to track delivery status information."
As the company prepared to move ahead with the Boston Proper site's redesign and upgrade, Miller says it was important that bostonproper.com remain true to its brand. "In terms of branding for each catalog, we try to keep that pure," says Miller. "The company maintains separate brand teams for each catalog so that all of its packaging, package inserts and phone contacts with customers are unique to each brand. Then, we work off of a common platform so that all of our brands have the same core competencies: merchandising, marketing, circulation and now online."
According to Miller, throughout the Web launch process, "Michael Tiernan and I have been heavily involved with Skip Hartzell, executive vice president and chief creative and Internet officer, and Rachel Pappert, director of e-commerce, in the decision making for the Web. It's been very healthy for us as a company, because it has forced us to look at all areas of our operation and how they work together."
It took only eight months for The Mark Group to take Boston Proper from its initial Web site to the more robust one. "The first site went up in April of 1999, by September of that same year we were starting to create a more dynamic and vibrant site that was an extension of the Boston Proper brand and image; and by December of 1999, our new site was up and running," recalls Pappert.
Making the Web Creative Fit the Image
Making Boston Proper's Web site creative fit the brand was one of the biggest challenges for the new site. "When we looked at moving our brand image to the Web, we knew it wasn't going to work with a standard grid structure," recalls Hartzell, a 17-year veteran of the company. He knew creating something "seductively feminine," the brand's mantra, would require breaking some rules.
According to Hartzell, creating the site was a similar process to when the company re-launched Boston Proper after its acquisition it in the early 1990s. "We wanted an audacious attitude. We did not want a 'plain vanilla' catalog. Our shoppers are confident, bold. And, just as the catalog did, the site needed to reflect that."
Pappert and Hartzell got their ideas for the re-launch from surfing every site from The New York Times to Victoria's Secret. "We did not want to reinvent the wheel, but we then added our own layer of innovation to these best practices to create the look and feel of the site, as well as develop specialty features," remarks Pappert. In addition, the company hired consultant Lauren Freedman, president of The e-tailing Group, to critique its "toe in the water" test. Freedman gave the Internet team some best practices to follow as they moved the Boston Proper Web project into phase two.
From there, Pappert and Hartzell held lots of brainstorming sessions with its in-house Web creative team to see what ideas could be applied to the site and further expand their own innovations. One example of an idea gleaned from this process: the "e-mail a friend" feature seen on bostonproper.com today. "We adapted this concept to send an outfit [similar to shopping with a girlfriend and asking, 'What do you think of this dress for next Saturday's party?'], which was not commonplace in the apparel industry when bostonproper.com was re-launched," says Pappert.
"Our goal was to create something that was uniquely Boston Proper. We did not want a cookie-cutter site. We wanted bostonproper.com to be reflective of the brand, and also be able to do functional shopping processes like cross-selling merchandise," says Pappert. "We are not a site designed by engineers, and we didn't want our site to have a bunch of buttons going down a navigational bar on the side.
Overall, the site was designed to provide customers with detailed information, allowing shoppers to see different angles of products (front, back, side), view close-up, fabric swatches and see complimentary accessories right all on the same page, in order to create effortless shopping. The detailed views have decreased return rates, says Hartzell. And according to Pappert, presenting outfits and accessories side-by-side has led to an increase in accessory and shoe sales online vs. the catalog. In addition, average order sizes are also $15 to $20 higher online.
Among the ways the site keeps its seductive, edgy feel is by using lots of on-model photography. "Unlike many apparel sites, we don't want to show small, product shots. We want to evoke an attitude," says Pappert. The company has years of photos stored in its digital files. With 95 percent of its product shots on-model, it was easy for the company to utilize Mouse-Over Technology, which allows shoppers to see three or four views of a product simply by moving their mouse.
According to Pappert, on-model photography is a plus for selling online, because it helps with color correctness. "If you see a model and her skin looks green," says Pappert, "you know there's something off with your monitor and that the clothing's color is not coming through correctly either."
Improving Customers' Shopping Experience
The Mark Group says the key to making the Internet channel of distribution successful for its target market segments is not merely to put up Web sites like the Boston Proper site, but to revolutionize the customer's overall shopping experience. Among the ways the company did this, was being one of the first in the industry to utilize the dynamic population of Web pages with a real-time link. "This means an item disappears automatically the minute it becomes out-of-stock," explains Miller. "This is possible due to a real-time link to the fulfillment system."
Plus, as Pappert notes, "The difference between our back-order notification method and others, is that we give shoppers an exact date for shipment before the customer goes to checkout. That way they can decide whether to proceed with buying the item, especially if the item is for a special event or is needed by a specific date."
Another feature the company has introduced to the Boston Proper site is "lifestyle" navigation techniques. "Lifestyle shopping," explains Miller, "is browsing by the functionality of the clothes." For example, the entire Boston Proper workout collection is found under the "On the Move" area of the "Shop by Lifestyle" section of the site. "The Boston Proper Web site provides almost 10 times as many items as the Boston Proper catalog, all available for order. [Bostonproper.com features more than 2,500 items, whereas a the catalog usually has 250 items.] So, we needed a way to make the site easily searchable for shoppers," says Miller.
The company's customer service also has been impacted by the Internet. "Our CSRs now also respond to customer service questions via e-mail," says Miller, noting that the company prides itself on the fact that it responds to any customer e-mail within one hour. "We've put into place a team of fast typers who can respond to calls and to e-mails." Miller also points out that to facilitate this feature, the company invested in some new equipment, including 19-inch monitors to allow the CSRs to view both e-mail and telephone order entry screens at once.
E-mail also has become part of the ordering process for orders taken online and off. "We give e-mail confirmation of orders to people who provide us with e-mail addresses," says Bryant.
The company has built a file of more than 200,000 e-mail addresses from its customers. Customers who provide an e-mail address can do so in three ways, creating a three-level opt-in: 1. those who just want information about their orders; 2. those who want information and offers from Boston Proper; and 3. those who want information and offers from other marketers, as well.
Pappert says, "We send an e-mail update to communicate with our opt-ins every two weeks. It might be a new merchandise preview, news about a sale, or something on the lighter side like a holiday poem. But, we're very conscious of not over mailing."
Expect more e-mail activity from Boston Proper in the future. Now that the company has a decent-sized e-mail file, it is starting to segment it for targeting. "We're also working with Abacus and Z-24 and will use some of their e-mail names for a campaign shortly," says Miller.
The Mark Group has also found an online affiliate program to be quite effective. "We've hired a company to go out and set up links for us on non-competitive sites and e-commerce portals that make sense. We're also advertising on portals to drive traffic," says Pappert.
Moving Forward: What's Next?
Hartzell and Pappert have found e-mail to be an important feedback tool to develop future Web sites and make improvements to the Boston Proper site. "Skip and I read every single customer comment from the Web," says Pappert. For example, customer feedback revealed that derivative searching, frequently used on Web stores, frustrated shoppers. "On many Web sites, if you type in 'bra,' it would also bring up 'bracelets,'" explains Pappert. "We took [the derivative search technology] out and provided shoppers more precise searching capabilities by keyword. So now when a customer puts in a keyword to search for, only exact matches to what has been typed in will appear on the screen."
The biggest challenges Boston Proper has faced with the site have been technology related. "We discovered some browser-related problems early on," recalls Pappert. "Shoppers without 56k access were having difficulty loading our pages. And AOL presented its own challenges."
Hartzell adds, "Speed is always an issue for Web shoppers. People don't want to wait for pages to load. The site wasn't as fast as we would have liked, so we made some major adjustments to our servers, the weight of the graphics on our pages and of our product images. This was right after our launch. As soon as we fixed these issues, sales jumped."
Charles Keath's and Mark, Fore & Strike's second generation sites are planned to launch this year. As each of those catalogs moves to a more robust Web presence, Hartzell says, "We expect to go through a similar process in moving those brands to the Web. The goal, of course, will be to keep the look and feel of each brand sacred."
fast facts
Founded in 1951 as retail store Mark, Fore & Strike
$115 million sales (in 2000)
Operates three catalogs: Boston Proper, Charles Keath and Mark Fore & Strike, retail stores and a growing Web presence.
Catalogs represent over 85 percent of current net sales
Mailed more than 60 million catalogs in 2000
List Manager: Mokrynski
The Retailer's Source for Content & Community
The Mark Group - Branded Online (2,303 words)
By Alicia Orr
With all of the excitement of the Internet in the past few years, some catalogers have forgotten the most basic rule of direct marketing; that it must first focus on providing customer satisfaction. One company that has not forgotten this is The Mark Group, the Boca Raton, FL-based company that publishes the Boston Proper, Charles Keath and Mark, Fore & Strike catalogs. As company CEO Michael Tiernan projected a year and a half ago: "As e-commerce evolves... ultimately success is not dependent on Web traffic, click-through rates or market capitalization, but on earning customer trust on every single transaction."
Today, a top goal for Tiernan and his management team is to create a pleasurable and seamless customer shopping experience on the Web.
The Mark Group believes in the future of the Internet and has big Web plans for the future. Currently, Boston Proper generates more than 15 percent of its total sales via the Web. "We project that more than 45 percent of our business will be conducted over the Internet within three to four years," says Seth Miller, chief operating officer. "Our whole business strategy is to serve the large baby boomer demographic and make shopping effortless and convenient for our customers. We saw that the baby boomers were adapting quickly to technology. Through the Web, we felt that there was an opportunity to reduce mailings and phone orders and that some of our customers might even favor the Web."
A "Toe in the Water" Test
When it was time to test the Web waters, The Mark Group took what it terms a "toe in the water" approach. "We believed that the Boston Proper customer was our most likely customer for the Web, due to its demographics," says Miller. "So, we opted not to start with the Boston Proper Web site, and instead, learn in a lower volume environment with Mark, Fore & Strike [a customer with a bit older demographic, Baby Boomer/New Senior, than that of Boston Proper]."
The very first site for The Mark Group was a static site for Mark, Fore & Strike, which made its debut in December 1998. The site was essentially an electronic order form without any real-time inventory capabilities. Mark, Fore & Strike shoppers reacted favorably to the site during a four-month assessment period that included three months of online selling. "This exercise gave us an indication that it was worth investing further in this medium," says Miller.
Next the company launched sites for Charles Keath and Boston Proper on the same basic platform. "We then reversed our strategy," explained Miller. "For the more dynamic Web site upgrade, we decided to start with Boston Proper first."
All Systems Go for Boston Proper
To move toward a more dynamic site, according to Miller, the first step was to purchase a base e-commerce package and have it fully customized. The Mark Group chose software and integrated it with the company's back-end systems, including CommercialWare's retail.dot.commerce. "The Web site was integrated real-time into fulfillment software, so that regardless of whether an order comes in via phone, mail or Web, it is processed into one system," explains Scott Bryant, vice president, operations. "This makes order handling seamless and makes it easy to track delivery status information."
As the company prepared to move ahead with the Boston Proper site's redesign and upgrade, Miller says it was important that bostonproper.com remain true to its brand. "In terms of branding for each catalog, we try to keep that pure," says Miller. "The company maintains separate brand teams for each catalog so that all of its packaging, package inserts and phone contacts with customers are unique to each brand. Then, we work off of a common platform so that all of our brands have the same core competencies: merchandising, marketing, circulation and now online."
According to Miller, throughout the Web launch process, "Michael Tiernan and I have been heavily involved with Skip Hartzell, executive vice president and chief creative and Internet officer, and Rachel Pappert, director of e-commerce, in the decision making for the Web. It's been very healthy for us as a company, because it has forced us to look at all areas of our operation and how they work together."
It took only eight months for The Mark Group to take Boston Proper from its initial Web site to the more robust one. "The first site went up in April of 1999, by September of that same year we were starting to create a more dynamic and vibrant site that was an extension of the Boston Proper brand and image; and by December of 1999, our new site was up and running," recalls Pappert.
Making the Web Creative Fit the Image
Making Boston Proper's Web site creative fit the brand was one of the biggest challenges for the new site. "When we looked at moving our brand image to the Web, we knew it wasn't going to work with a standard grid structure," recalls Hartzell, a 17-year veteran of the company. He knew creating something "seductively feminine," the brand's mantra, would require breaking some rules.
According to Hartzell, creating the site was a similar process to when the company re-launched Boston Proper after its acquisition it in the early 1990s. "We wanted an audacious attitude. We did not want a 'plain vanilla' catalog. Our shoppers are confident, bold. And, just as the catalog did, the site needed to reflect that."
Pappert and Hartzell got their ideas for the re-launch from surfing every site from The New York Times to Victoria's Secret. "We did not want to reinvent the wheel, but we then added our own layer of innovation to these best practices to create the look and feel of the site, as well as develop specialty features," remarks Pappert. In addition, the company hired consultant Lauren Freedman, president of The e-tailing Group, to critique its "toe in the water" test. Freedman gave the Internet team some best practices to follow as they moved the Boston Proper Web project into phase two.
From there, Pappert and Hartzell held lots of brainstorming sessions with its in-house Web creative team to see what ideas could be applied to the site and further expand their own innovations. One example of an idea gleaned from this process: the "e-mail a friend" feature seen on bostonproper.com today. "We adapted this concept to send an outfit [similar to shopping with a girlfriend and asking, 'What do you think of this dress for next Saturday's party?'], which was not commonplace in the apparel industry when bostonproper.com was re-launched," says Pappert.
"Our goal was to create something that was uniquely Boston Proper. We did not want a cookie-cutter site. We wanted bostonproper.com to be reflective of the brand, and also be able to do functional shopping processes like cross-selling merchandise," says Pappert. "We are not a site designed by engineers, and we didn't want our site to have a bunch of buttons going down a navigational bar on the side.
Overall, the site was designed to provide customers with detailed information, allowing shoppers to see different angles of products (front, back, side), view close-up, fabric swatches and see complimentary accessories right all on the same page, in order to create effortless shopping. The detailed views have decreased return rates, says Hartzell. And according to Pappert, presenting outfits and accessories side-by-side has led to an increase in accessory and shoe sales online vs. the catalog. In addition, average order sizes are also $15 to $20 higher online.
Among the ways the site keeps its seductive, edgy feel is by using lots of on-model photography. "Unlike many apparel sites, we don't want to show small, product shots. We want to evoke an attitude," says Pappert. The company has years of photos stored in its digital files. With 95 percent of its product shots on-model, it was easy for the company to utilize Mouse-Over Technology, which allows shoppers to see three or four views of a product simply by moving their mouse.
According to Pappert, on-model photography is a plus for selling online, because it helps with color correctness. "If you see a model and her skin looks green," says Pappert, "you know there's something off with your monitor and that the clothing's color is not coming through correctly either."
Improving Customers' Shopping Experience
The Mark Group says the key to making the Internet channel of distribution successful for its target market segments is not merely to put up Web sites like the Boston Proper site, but to revolutionize the customer's overall shopping experience. Among the ways the company did this, was being one of the first in the industry to utilize the dynamic population of Web pages with a real-time link. "This means an item disappears automatically the minute it becomes out-of-stock," explains Miller. "This is possible due to a real-time link to the fulfillment system."
Plus, as Pappert notes, "The difference between our back-order notification method and others, is that we give shoppers an exact date for shipment before the customer goes to checkout. That way they can decide whether to proceed with buying the item, especially if the item is for a special event or is needed by a specific date."
Another feature the company has introduced to the Boston Proper site is "lifestyle" navigation techniques. "Lifestyle shopping," explains Miller, "is browsing by the functionality of the clothes." For example, the entire Boston Proper workout collection is found under the "On the Move" area of the "Shop by Lifestyle" section of the site. "The Boston Proper Web site provides almost 10 times as many items as the Boston Proper catalog, all available for order. [Bostonproper.com features more than 2,500 items, whereas a the catalog usually has 250 items.] So, we needed a way to make the site easily searchable for shoppers," says Miller.
The company's customer service also has been impacted by the Internet. "Our CSRs now also respond to customer service questions via e-mail," says Miller, noting that the company prides itself on the fact that it responds to any customer e-mail within one hour. "We've put into place a team of fast typers who can respond to calls and to e-mails." Miller also points out that to facilitate this feature, the company invested in some new equipment, including 19-inch monitors to allow the CSRs to view both e-mail and telephone order entry screens at once.
E-mail also has become part of the ordering process for orders taken online and off. "We give e-mail confirmation of orders to people who provide us with e-mail addresses," says Bryant.
The company has built a file of more than 200,000 e-mail addresses from its customers. Customers who provide an e-mail address can do so in three ways, creating a three-level opt-in: 1. those who just want information about their orders; 2. those who want information and offers from Boston Proper; and 3. those who want information and offers from other marketers, as well.
Pappert says, "We send an e-mail update to communicate with our opt-ins every two weeks. It might be a new merchandise preview, news about a sale, or something on the lighter side like a holiday poem. But, we're very conscious of not over mailing."
Expect more e-mail activity from Boston Proper in the future. Now that the company has a decent-sized e-mail file, it is starting to segment it for targeting. "We're also working with Abacus and Z-24 and will use some of their e-mail names for a campaign shortly," says Miller.
The Mark Group has also found an online affiliate program to be quite effective. "We've hired a company to go out and set up links for us on non-competitive sites and e-commerce portals that make sense. We're also advertising on portals to drive traffic," says Pappert.
Moving Forward: What's Next?
Hartzell and Pappert have found e-mail to be an important feedback tool to develop future Web sites and make improvements to the Boston Proper site. "Skip and I read every single customer comment from the Web," says Pappert. For example, customer feedback revealed that derivative searching, frequently used on Web stores, frustrated shoppers. "On many Web sites, if you type in 'bra,' it would also bring up 'bracelets,'" explains Pappert. "We took [the derivative search technology] out and provided shoppers more precise searching capabilities by keyword. So now when a customer puts in a keyword to search for, only exact matches to what has been typed in will appear on the screen."
The biggest challenges Boston Proper has faced with the site have been technology related. "We discovered some browser-related problems early on," recalls Pappert. "Shoppers without 56k access were having difficulty loading our pages. And AOL presented its own challenges."
Hartzell adds, "Speed is always an issue for Web shoppers. People don't want to wait for pages to load. The site wasn't as fast as we would have liked, so we made some major adjustments to our servers, the weight of the graphics on our pages and of our product images. This was right after our launch. As soon as we fixed these issues, sales jumped."
Charles Keath's and Mark, Fore & Strike's second generation sites are planned to launch this year. As each of those catalogs moves to a more robust Web presence, Hartzell says, "We expect to go through a similar process in moving those brands to the Web. The goal, of course, will be to keep the look and feel of each brand sacred."
fast facts
Founded in 1951 as retail store Mark, Fore & Strike
$115 million sales (in 2000)
Operates three catalogs: Boston Proper, Charles Keath and Mark Fore & Strike, retail stores and a growing Web presence.
Catalogs represent over 85 percent of current net sales
Mailed more than 60 million catalogs in 2000
List Manager: Mokrynski