Indochino Tailors Customer Experiences with Qubit
For Indochino, a men’s retailer that specializes in custom suits, a perfect fit is as vital as anything. The logic extends beyond just the dressing room, as the company aims to ensure that every time customers interact with its digital or physical properties, they are getting the experience that suits their needs, and makes them comfortable whether stationary or on the go.
Founded in Vancouver in 2007, Indochino began as an online-only operation, but by the middle of 2014, it began its expansion to brick-and-mortar locations across the United States and Canada. In the two years since, the company has done exceedingly well with the transition, with showrooms now accounting for nearly 50 percent of its business.
But the transformation has had its challenges, according to Pilar Catala, director of omnichannel digital experience at Indochino. “As an online-first retailer, we have been very good at using data to help us build an outstanding customer journey online,” Catala says. But, “as we branched offline—first through pop-up shops, before moving into permanent retail—we realized that we had very little insight into the in-store customer journey.” Indochino’s aim was to create an experience that not only was unique to each customer but also allowed him to move easily between online and offline channels.
Enter digital experience management provider Qubit. “The main reason we started working with Qubit was to be able to segment our customer base to optimize the online experience,” Catala says. “For example, to display different content for new [or] returning customers, or those in showroom markets [versus] the rest of the market.”
According to Ian McCaig, founder and chief marketing officer of Qubit, Indochino’s top segments included a VIP tier, those who had bought several suits and will continue to buy more; a tier for men in the market for wedding tuxedos; and a tier for recent college graduates who have just begun looking for their first jobs. These are “very, very different segments, with very different buying behaviors,” McCaig explains.
When the efforts began, Indochino applied Qubit’s Visitor Cloud platform as an agile extension to its content management and e-commerce systems. The Visitor Cloud is a data hub that collects customer browsing and purchase data to create a fluid view of each customer. This data can be used for A/B testing, segmentation, and unique Web experiences. The experiences can also be augmented with contextual information, McCaig says. “A big thing for Indochino was they had traveling tailors,” he adds, and the retailer wanted to use geolocation to target customers when they were in the vicinity of fitting rooms while using other information such as the weather to better understand its influence on their preferences and tendencies.
Armed with these insights, the retailer has been able to design more effective marketing campaigns. Since implementing the technology to power omnichannel campaigns, Indochino has seen a 4.2 percent bump in revenue per customer, as well as a 3.7 percent increase in conversions. In May 2016, the retailer saw its record sales month.
“One of the best parts about the Qubit platform is that everything is measurable,” Catala said in a statement. “We closely monitor and review the results of our campaigns and are constantly working to improve on our success.”
“The insights that we have been able to gather from our showrooms and clients in showroom markets have been instrumental in allowing us to expand at the current rate,” Catala adds.
All told, Qubit’s platform has driven more than $1 million in incremental revenue for Indochino. According to McCaig, Qubit is helping Indochino to further personalize the customer experience by making suit fittings fun, memorable events—by, for example, collecting better customer data to figure out preferences such as drinks to have on hand at stores. Indochino has plans to open up 150 new locations in the next four years.
The Payoff
Since launching Qubit's Visitor Cloud platform, Indochino has seen:
- a 4.2 percent bump in revenue per customer;
- a 3.7 percent increase in conversions; and
- a record sales month, in May 2016.