Fashion retail chain Forever 21 is in the midst of an online marketing remake and mobile is a pillar of its strategy.
Gerard Florendo, who joined Forever 21 as manager of online marketing and Web analytics in April, was tasked with deploying up-to-date tools and scaling their respective reach alongside the brand’s new head of ecommerce.
He said the company will be weaning off of a homegrown commerce platform to (IBM) WebSphere by the middle of next year and that the company recently ended its relationship with another retargeting vendor to begin work with ecommerce programmatic display solutions provider Sociomantic Labs in June.
Forever 21 is a beta user of Sociomantic Streaming CRM for Mobile, a mobile dynamic display tool the company released widely today. Sociomantic mobile campaigns give marketers access to display inventory across various browsers and apps via a real-time bidding engine as well as access to dynamic HTML5 banner technology; integrations to CRM and loyalty data facilitate unified messaging cross-device, the company claims.
Though mobile represents a smaller fraction of online traffic for the Forever 21 brand than desktop at present, “I am seeing that it’s increasingly [driving] a lot more traffic and page views,” Florendo commented. “We started our mobile campaign last week [with Sociomantic] and it’s converting pretty well for our desktop version and I’m also driving traffic to our mobile site” using the tool.
Because Forever 21 is running Google Enhanced Campaigns, “I’m [already] spending that money so I have to make sure I have the remarketing campaigns set for the mobile site also.” Florendo said the brand also runs remarketing campaigns on Facebook because it has more than 8 million fans on that social platform.
“Right now we’re working with Sociomantic to open up our [reach on Facebook] and get more out of different ad units on Facebook,” he said. Forever 21 next will run dynamic creative in the newsfeed to get in front of the 16-34 demographic of Forever 21 customers, a majority of whom are Facebook account holders, he said.
Right now, Florendo said his target goal is to drive better, qualified traffic to the website and augment mobile into everything the brand tackles. “For now, it’s learning and expanding some more, especially now that we’re also working with a new testing tool,” he said. “Once we get there, we’ll tie testing from Sociomantic to potentially create a different landing page for each customer” or go after shopping cart abandonment through personalized offers.
He added, “Most of the time, customers go to the website through a paid search or display campaign that I ran … [A]t the end of the day, [I want to] increase that return on ad spend and conversion.”
