Expert Interview – Amy McDowell – Baublebar USA

Mark Freidin

5th Mar 2015

Expert  interview with  Amy McDowell, VP Digital marketing – Baublebar

Status: DIGITAL MARKETING  

We ask Amy a few  questions to learn a few things about her and her exciting role. 

What is the Critical Success Factor in your business

BaubleBar has one of the largest selections of fashion jewelry online, with hundreds of new styles added to our website each week. One of our biggest competitive advantages is speed to market. BaubleBar capitalizes on trending styles much more quickly than traditional retailers. We analyze our sales and SKU data in real-time and using our proprietary sourcing capabilities, we can get fast-selling products produced and ready for sale on-site in a matter of weeks. Customers can access popular, trending styles that would have been otherwise sold-out at a brick-and-mortar retailer, at an attractive price that is encourages experimentation and repeat purchase. We also offer free shipping/returns and free styling guidance from our customer service team called SWAT (Service with Accessorizing Talent) via email, phone or video.  

Even though this “fast-fashion” model for jewelry may seem simple, our continual excellence and innovation in execution is what helps set BaubleBar apart.

What is the most beneficial traffic and subscription driver to your site/s?

Is it Press/Media, Social Media, SEO PPC, Affiliate? : At BaubleBar, the marketing team doesn’t consider any single channel as “most beneficial” — we’ve found that each channel plays an important part of the conversion process for our customers. After studying the referral paths of how users interact with the BaubleBar site, we found that on average, it may take anywhere between 3-10 interactions across multiple marketing sources before a new visitor purchases for the first time.
For example, a new user may discover BaubleBar from a Facebook ad, then visit our Facebook brand page and click over to our site. Over the course of the next week, she gets retargeted by our display ads. Finally, she is forwarded a fashion blog post about a new product collaboration on BaubleBar by her friend. She does a search on Google for “BaubleBar necklaces” and at last, purchases an item. While BaubleBar has specialized teams that manage each channel directly, they are in constant communication with each other to maintain strong, consistent messaging. The overall effectiveness of our acquisition program hinges upon all of these digital channels working in concert.

What are your biggest eCommerce challenges?

Multichannel attribution continues to be a major challenge. BaubleBar’s customers are digitally savvy and connected, so managing multiple channel sources across various devices to optimize our marketing spend is getting more complex. In 2015, we’re also adding offline channels to the media mix so attribution will likely get even more difficult.

What do you predict for the future of your business and eCommerce?

I hope to see the continued growth and success of BaubleBar. We’ve grown our revenues by over 300% this past year. With focus and hard work, we look to exceed this in 2015.

What was your best day in eCommerce, what did you sell and how did you drive those sales?

Not surprisingly, Cyber Monday (the Monday after the U.S. holiday, Thanksgiving Day) is always our biggest revenue day. Many U.S. retailers including BaubleBar run big promotions during that time in order to capture holiday gifting sales. Last year, we had a great discount offer on the website as well as callouts to play our holiday-themed online game. The online game lived on our site and mirrored a vending machine experience (the idea of “instant” gifting like that in a vending machine was an overarching theme for our 2014 holiday season) that dispensed “gifts,” in the form of discount codes, which made it possible to win even bigger discounts. We’ve found this dual-pronged strategy greatly increased customer engagement, which in turn increased both conversion rates and basket sizes.

Amy McDowell  is the VP, Digital <arketing at BaubleBar Inc. She will be speaking at the eCommerce Conference and Expo 11 – 12 March 2015