Many marketers view customer loyalty programs as key differentiators on the road to success. Just ask Brown Shoe Company.
During the company’s third-quarter financial results conference call on Tuesday, President and CEO Diane Sullivan noted how vital Brown Shoe Company’s customer loyalty program is to overall customer engagement and brand loyalty.
“Consumers not surprisingly continue to join our rewards program and use our mobile app during back-to-school,” Sullivan said during the conference call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “We had over one million downloads since our app was launched in September of 2013. We added a million new members to our awards program during the quarter as part of our back-to-school effort. Now we have close to 10 million rewards members.”
What’s more, Sullivan specified just how important the company’s loyalty program members are to its success.
“We all know that these multichannel consumers like these award members continue to be more valuable as the average annual shop is over 60% higher than consumers who shop using a single channel,” Sullivan said.
Despite industry-wide trends contributing to increased uncertainty in marked down activity, Sullivan said Brown Shoe has maintained its planned commercial cadence.
“And it’s also really rewarding to see the work that we’ve done over the last few years helps us to deliver another outstanding quarter with solid contributions for both wholesale and retail as we continue to gain traction on both sides of our business,” she said.
Third-quarter sales increased nearly 4%, to $729 million.
“While we certainly don’t know what to expect of weather this winter, we do expect to take the same approach to the promotional holiday environment and despite what other retailers are doing, we plan to maintain our promotional cadence as we did last year,” Sullivan explained. “We do not intend to sacrifice margin for sales and we expect to deliver a strong, overall 2014 at Famous Footwear.”
Sullivan added: “We succeeded in the quarter because each of these brands did try to embrace their unique consumer and capitalize on the relevant trends in the markets to drive their sales. For sure as we all know, booties did well across the board, but each brand also saw success with products that were really targeted towards their customer base. And Sam’s core products continued to shine as consumers remained really interested in these iconic items. During the quarter, we opened Sam’s second store in Beverly Hills and we also saw his apparel line ramp up at retail where it’s really striking a chord with his target customer.”