David Cost is VP of Digital and Ecommerce at Rainbow Shops (Rainbow), a moderately-priced American retail apparel company. He began his career in consulting at Grant Thorton before co-founding PriceSCAN.com, a retail price comparison website. From here, David spent 3.5 years as VP of Ecommerce & Digital Marketing at Deb Shops, Inc. before joining Rainbow nearly 10 years ago.
In our conversation, David talks about ways his team has removed user friction from Rainbow’s website by migrating to Shopify and leveraging Shop Pay. He discusses Rainbow’s mobile-first strategy, as well as the power of push notifications in mobile apps.
9 out of 10 people view our website with a mobile phone. We have been mobile-first by necessity for the 10 years I’ve been here. For some people, regardless of their incomes, their only computing device is their phones. Phones have gotten so powerful and mobile seems to be the primary way people interact with stores. Of course, more affluent folks may have laptops and tablets, but nearly everyone has a phone, regardless of economic status. That’s what’s driven us to be mobile first.
We think about lots of things in terms of screen real estate, because the screen on a phone is much smaller than a laptop or a desktop. We’re also constantly thinking about data input on a phone and what we can do to streamline that process. For example, what can we do to have you click fewer buttons? What can we do to have users start a process and receive a smart suggestion feature?
We’re constantly looking to take advantage of some of the new biometric features on mobile devices. Whether it’s Face ID or Touch ID, the ability to not have to type a password in is amazing. Same thing for applications like Apple Pay or Google Pay — people don’t have to take a credit card out and type anything in. We’re always looking for ways to complete processes on mobile to reduce user friction.
We’ve found that users fall into two camps: those who prefer to go to a web browser and those who prefer to use an app. In our case, the functionality of the website and the app are nearly identical. We have Face ID in the app but not on the web, but that’s the extent of the differences. Some people just prefer one way or another to access us.
Today, almost 20 percent of the business goes through our Apple or Google apps. It’s natural — we don’t offer any incentives to use our app. Yet, if people naturally prefer to access us via an app, we offer a great experience. We find in lots of areas of the business, it is suboptimal to force people to interact with companies in a way that is not natural for them.
For example, regarding social media, some people prefer Facebook to Instagram or TikTok. People have their channels and ways they want to interact with the world online. It’s hard to move people from one to the other, so we need to meet them where they are. That’s been our story and experience with native apps.
Yes — the number one feature we picked up by having native apps is the ability to communicate with customers via push notifications. Push notifications are super powerful in a world where email gets noisier and noisier. Also, people interact with email a little bit less every day.
We went through a bit of a ramp-up with text messaging or SMS when it was a novel way to communicate with customers. Nowadays, people don’t pay as much attention to it, especially since so much SMS comes into our phones now. People are starting to tune it out. That’s why push notifications have become deeply personal. Somebody has to have taken the effort to install our app, and on Apple, they have to have taken the step to actually enable push notifications.
Having the option to send a message — whether it’s a marketing initiative or transactional message about somebody’s order — via push is super valuable. It’s the number one reason and the way that we justify the expense of having apps.
We try to be pretty careful. We generally send one marketing message a day, but that marketing message comes with an entertainment value. When we write them, we’re writing them to be a fun little moment, not just a selling proposition. The more creative we keep those pushes, the more our users look forward to seeing the push every day because, even for five seconds, it can make them smile.
In terms of what we call transactional messaging, this is when someone just placed an order, it’s shipped, it’s out for delivery, etc. Those are messages that people care about. Being able to get those messages via push means that our customers never miss them. That’s the main way we’re using push notifications. We try very hard to not abuse that relationship and work to inject it with enough entertainment value that people don’t feel inclined to turn it off.
We use product analytics tools to see user feedback, such as rage clicks or dead clicks. We look at those tools for signals. The number one place we look to always reduce friction is the login part of the process, as well as checkout. We’re always looking to streamline the checkout experience.
We were long-term customers of Demandware and Salesforce Commerce Cloud, but we decided to re-platform to Shopify because of a feature they have called Shop Pay. Shopify has about three million retailers using the platform to run their online business. If a customer has shopped at any other retailer that has Shop Pay enabled, they’re automatically identified. With just a mobile number and email address, it can look up all that customer’s payment information and provide a one-click option to check out. The power of Shop Pay and being able to reduce the checkout friction is a huge advantage.
It’s been one of the biggest payoffs we’ve seen from making a big change. Today, almost a third of all checkouts on Rainbow happen with Shop Pay. That expedited one-click checkout is something that we couldn’t do on our own and can’t do with any other platform other than Shopify. For that reason, we prioritized the switch for the sake of reducing friction and we’re glad we did.
Depending on what it is we’re doing, we’re looking at time on site, how many pages somebody looks at, conversion rate, etc. All of these are indications to us of the impact of a certain change. Many times, we have to guess how we think something’s going to work or what its impact is going to be, and we’re always surprised. In general, you never know until you release something to the public and let them use it. It’s happened many times in my career, and it’s very humbling sometimes.
In terms of feedback, we get it in many different ways, such as app reviews or people calling or emailing customer service. We also get feedback from our brick-and-mortar chain. One of the biggest initiatives we’ve launched in the last couple of years is the ability to buy online but ship to a store for pickup. This was something we thought maybe 10 percent of our customers would use, but on some days, it’s almost one-third.
We’re now getting feedback from store managers as customers come in to pick up their orders and tell us what their shopping experience was like. More store associates are interacting with customers in-store if they need a size or color that isn’t available on-site. They also get a lot of feedback about how customers find the website’s shopping experience. Our ears are always open to getting feedback in any way we can.
The ship-to-store launch experience has been an eye-opener. We compete with Amazon and Shein for a lot of the fashion business, but neither one of them has physical storefronts. I knew we needed to leverage 1,000+ stores and create a more seamless experience. Ship-to-store has brought that home.
I’ve always felt that customers see a brand like Rainbow as just Rainbow. They don’t differentiate between online and in-store. Internally, that’s where we create silos or walls that separate each of those two channels. But to customers, it’s one and the same. The more we can bring those experiences together to make them seamless, the better able we can compete with somebody who might be online-only. Utilizing the stores in this way gives us something unique.
We are constantly testing and trying new things. We’re pretty lucky as a big retailer that we’re still pretty nimble. There are many times when there are only so many things that can be done in a lab before it’s time to see how it performs in the real world — whether it’s by a startup that’s invented something new or a new feature from a more established company. We run experiments all the time on new things and most of them don’t work out, but 10–20 percent of the time, they do. Those things tend to be additive to the business.
My advice is to stay open to change, try new things, and be humble enough to know that your ability to predict the future is a lot weaker than you think it is. The only way to get answers in many of these cases is to run the experiment.
The biggest one we have is the ship-to-store experience. We are diligent about post-purchase surveys, and we use a tool that lets us ask customers questions that they can volunteer to answer. We find that post-purchase surveys are very accurate in letting us know what customers are thinking. When we asked the question, “Would you like the ability to pick up a package in-store or for us to send it to a third-party location for pickup,” about 10 percent of users were interested in picking it up in-store. The 30 percent usage we then saw was a nice surprise for us after we launched.
Sometimes, even with something like a survey, we don’t really know how a release will perform unless we do it. We try to structure tests so that we minimize risk and expense to get a real answer. Can we make the tech overhead? Can we make the user overhead? Can we do enough things to make the test inexpensive to run? And can we do it in a way that if it doesn’t work, it won’t hurt us? We want to get real-life data to see which things we should really push versus which things, even though we’re glad we tried, don’t have an impact.
Over the past year, we have invested in our product imagery — both in terms of static images and video. We shoot a lot of product videos these days to give customers a full perspective of what they might buy. We looked into this by first asking, “OK, what’s that investment to shoot that video? Can we see any return?” Then, we put instrumentation on the website that looked at whether someone converts at a higher rate when they see that product video versus when they don’t.
In general, there are going to be more and more developments in user experience as technology improves. I’m sure that at some point, AI will be able to take an image of each of us and show how a clothing item would look on us individually rather than on a model. I can foresee lots of different things that may come down the line to make that shopping experience better. It changes every day and it never ceases to amaze us what new things exist today that would’ve been impossible two years ago. That’s one of the fun things about being in this business — so much of our world changes all the time.
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