Allison Dille
BRAND CONNECTION.………………………….......1 BRAND HISTORY………………………………….......1 DIGITAL MEDIA STRATEGY.………………………. 2 ANTHROPOLOGIE.COM.…..…………………3-4 INSTAGRAM………………………………………5 EMAIL……………………………………………6-7 GOOGLE TRENDS…………….………………………8 BENCHMARK/COMPETITORS………………………9 RECOMMENDATIONS...……………………………10
“a lifestyle brand that imparts a sense of beauty, optimism and discovery”
Ever since I was a little girl, shopping with my mom, I felt a connection to Anthropologie. A shopping trip to Anthropologie is more than just a shopping trip, but rather an experience. Through the artistically designed window displays to the cozy layout of the store, Anthropologie tells a well thought out story to each customer that walks through the store’s doors. As I grew up, I began to accompany my mom on less trips to Anthropologie and instead, it was me making trip to the store for myself. From apparel to gifts to candles to bedding, Anthropology is my go to. Anthropology and their holding group, URBN, is my dream company to work for one-day in the future. Also, throughout the years since I was younger and accompanying my mom on trips to Anthropology, there has been a large shift in retail. Retail has moved from the brick-and-motor system to being powered by ecommerce engines. To keep up with these changes Anthropology has established an online presence. Anthropologie’s online presence has infiltrated my email inbox, and social media feed giving me a taste of the “Anthropologie experience” even when I am not in the store.
Founded in 1992, by Richard Hayne, Anthropologie is part of the URBN brands which also include; Urban Outfitters, Free People, BHLDN and Terrain. Anthropologie is a women’s clothing retailer that offers an assortment of women’s apparel, accessories, home accessories and décor, small gifts and other knick-knacks. The first brick-and-motor location opened its doors in Wayne, Pennsylvania. By 1998, the company launched its mail-order catalog and e-commerce website. In 2009, Anthropologie expanded internationally to Toronto, and since then has other stores international stores in Canada and the UK. Altogether, Anthropologie owns and operates over 200 retail stores and continues to expand. Recently, the brand has begun to open a new concept type of store called Anthropologie & Co. These stores mimic a department store layout with fully decorated showrooms and wide product offerings than a standard Anthropologie store.
1
The Anthropologie brand has such a clear target audience; it would be very effective for them to create advertising around their established audience. However, this is not exactly the case. In fact, Anthropologie does not use typical advertising to reach its customers; there are no print ads or television commercials. Anthropologie has taken a back seat and let the brands stores and social media connections forge a connection with customers. A reason for this barely there marketing strategy, is that the brand has found its customer and effectively knows how to communicate and attract her without spending millions doing so. Anthropologie is currently active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat as well as their own blog site. Their website is an e-commerce platform with its own personal blog. The brands employees update the blog regularly. All social media platforms are monitored 2-3 times a day. In addition to their social media, they have an e-commerce app for smartphones. All the social media content is very similar and tries to bring audiences the “Anthropologie experience” that can be found in stores. The brand has embraced transmedia and creates an omni-channel experience by creating similar related content on each platform but adapting it to best communicate on each specific platform using identical hash tags such as; #anthrosummer, #shoesdaytuesday and #anthroholidays. Also, the brand is successful in encouraging followers to include Anthropologie’s hash tags in their own posts in order to increase the two-way communication between customers. The brand’s accounts also frequently “re-post” customer generated content to build a relationship with their niche customer base. As Rushkoff states, the new King of digital is contact over content and Anthropologie has followed this recommendation by increasing the contact the brand has with its customers through social media. The brand does an exceptional job at replying to comments from customers on their posts. Customers can expect a through reply in 2-3 hours after their original comment, no matter the platform. The first social media rule states “if all you do is respond to complaints, that’s all people will send you”. Anthropologie doesn’t just reply to negative commentary but also positive praise received from followers, making the experience feel personalized for the customer. The brand highly encourages and facilitates 2-way conversations on their social media pages.
2
With the wide array of product offerings Anthropologie has to offer, it is impossible to display everything instores. This makes their e-commerce platform extremely vital to the brand. Launched in 1998, Anthropologies website has evolved to be in the top 500 largest online retailers, landing at number 192. With over 29% of the brands sales coming from their e-commerce platforms, and online sales growing at a rate of nearly 20% each year, it is imperative Anthropologie offers a strong platform that delivers customers the same “Anthropologie experience” they are famously known for in stores. Anthropologie has a clean layout that is easy for the user to navigate. While the site has a high volume of merchandise, there is a place for everything making sure the site never feels crowded. The search feature is useful and provides accurate results, and is sales focused with multiple ways to add an item to your cart and an easy checkout process. The brand’s big bold images of their merchandise highlight the company’s higher-end clientele. Below are the homepages from 2016’s September, October, November and December. All images carry the look and feel of Anthropologie with the large bold images that are true to the brands voice.
3
With a large social media presence Anthropologie’s website provides access to these multiple platforms. The website includes a built-in blog as well as links to the various social media platforms they are currently present on. The one interesting things is that these links are only available in the footer making it hard for the consumer to find. With their marketing strategy focusing mainly on making connections through social media, their platforms should be a greater focus on the e-commerce site.
Another weakness of the brand’s website is that worthy to note is the reviews system and the frequency it is used. The “best seller” products each have 5-10 reviews while most products have none. Reviews play a large role in a consumer’s decision-making process and should be better utilized on the platform. Below is an image of a top selling product with only 9 reviews for consumers to view. With millions of customers, there should be more reviews in order to establish credibility with buyers visiting the site.
4
Anthropologie customers respond to visual, graphic content that conveys the tone and feeling of Anthropologie. That is why Anthropologie’s most followed social media page, with over 2.6 million followers, is their Instagram account. The brands Instagram has more followers than its competitors accounts. This platform serves as the most valuable social media platform due to its focus on visual content. Anthropologie customers respond strongly to the visual content the brand creates. The brand creates content by curating their own posts and #regraming customers’ photos if they tag @anthropologie in their post.
I used Keyhole.com to track the brand’s engagements (likes and comments) with customers on the platform. Over the course of one month, the brand had an average of 19,485 likes and 110 comments per post.
Anthropologie also urges customers to interact and reuse their hashtags. This generates an organic WOM campaign between the brand’s followers and their followers’ networks. In the past month the #terrainevents has had 40K engagements and #anthroholidays has received a sentiment score of 97 and has generated over 200 organic posts times since it debuted 2 weeks ago.
5
Anthropologie’s email marketing has many great aspects but also areas for improvement. The graphic, image packed emails are coded with HTML5 and offer customers with vivid imagery and moving images and artwork that mimic the in store experience. As Cialdini states in WOI, one way to persuade customers to persuade customers to visit your website is by being consistent and committing to acting in a way that is consistent with the brands values and identity. Anthropologie follows this rule through the content and imagery included in their emails. Below are examples of the graphic images included in emails.
Anthropologie’s emails create an omni-channel experience not only through the imagery but also by the footer found in the email. The footer includes links to their Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter accounts, as well as, their own blog. In addition, the footer includes a link to download their e-commerce app. This multichannel approach helps create a seamless shopping experience for the customer.
6
According to the Social Business Textbook, one-way personalization occurs in the digital world is through geography. Anthropologie utilizes this data by including an integrated location feature on their emails. This feature notifies customers of the closest Anthropologie store to them based on their location. While adding to the omni-channel experience this is a unique feature that gives customers the information about a store closest to them without them having to navigate to the store locator on the web page. While Anthropologie does a good job creating the “Anthropologie experience” and creating a multichannel experience through their emails, there is also areas that can be improved within their email campaigns. The frequency of the emails is excessive and does not convey a “high-end” or “exclusive” feeling the brand is attempting to portray. Since I began tracking on September 13th, the store has sent an email once a day, everyday. The brand could use an Air Traffic Control email system that tracks customer habits and sends customer’s emails according to the frequency of their interactions with the brand.
Although the email frequency is overbearing, the emails offer the option to receive emails less frequently when customers click the “unsubscribe” action at the bottom of the email. The brand has complied to the CAN-SPAM Act, that states that recipients must have the ability to stop incoming emails from a third-party, by including the “unsubscribe” call-to-action. When recipients take the action they are presented with the options to customize the frequency in which they receive emails. This should be an option for recipients at the beginning of the email relationship to avoid frustration.
7
This Google trends report shows how often people searched “Anthropologie� since 2004. The brand steadily gained popularity until it hit its highest traffic peak in 2012. Since then traffic has been on a general decline. Some of this decrease in traffic can be accredited to the down turn in the economy and in retail in general, but Anthropologie also needs to continue increasing its online presence to gain customer’s attention.
This Google map report shows the regions these searches from the report above are coming from. Anthropologie only has a physical presence in the US, Canada and the UK but has received substantial online attention from countries like Austria, Australia, Switzerland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Ireland, Belgium and Singapore. This is interesting since the website is only translated to English or French. This indicates that the brand could translate their site to more possible languages to accommodate for the interest found online.
Below shows the Google Trend report from just 2016. Traffic remains static throughout the year but spikes in November through December due to the heavy push of their holiday campaign through email and social media. The brand is known for their gift items which are very popular around this time of year, the brand does a good job of capitalizing on this.
8
The brands largest competitors include; J. Crew, Madewell, Nordstrom and Banana Republic. All these brands have an exclusive and high-end stereotype similar to Anthropologie. With similar target audiences, how do their digital marketing strategies stack up against each other? I decided to benchmark Anthropologie against its main competitors using Google Trends to see how see how often the brands were searched for in relation to one another over the past year. Beating Madewell in number of web searches over the past year, Anthropologie did slightly worse than J. Crew and Banana Republic and noticeably worse than Nordstrom. Granted, Nordstrom has a wider product offering, Anthropologie’s relevancy is behind the department store retailer.
I wanted to analyze the number of visits each of these sites received on a monthly basis. Using Quantcast, I was able to track the number of unique site visits to Anthropologie, J. Crew and Nordstrom. Anthropologie is noticeably behind its competitors when it comes to unique site visits. The brand needs to engage is more Whit Hat search engine techniques to optimize its search engine optimization results. While searching “Anthropologie” produces positive search results, the brand needs to build keywords and begin to think like the customer and spell words wrong so that when customers search “Anthropology” and other related terms, the brand’s website will appear above the fold on the first page.
I also compared the number of followers each brand has across multiple social media platforms. Anthropologie remains competitive with their competitors in terms of the number of followers they have, they even have the most on their Instagram platform.
9
To improve Anthropologie’s digital marketing efforts I have come up with three recommendations that will leave the customer more satisfied with their experience and ultimately drive sales. 1. Improve product reviews. Product reviews, both negative and positive, help drive online sales immensely. They provide authenticity and validity to a product. Anthropologie’s most popular products only have an average of 5-10 product reviews while most items have none. I suggest Anthropologie create a program similar to Amazon’s Vine program. The brand would select a percentage of their customers to send an assortment of products to, these loyal customers would have a chance to use the products then be asked to write a review on the products they were given. In order to comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s rules, these reviews would notify readers that the individuals were a part of the review program. Program participants would be encouraged to provide honest and authentic feedback on products in order to grow the number of product reviews. Not only would the number of product reviews increase but overall word-of-mouth marketing would increase as well. 2. Integrate social media to e-commerce platform. Another way the Anthropologie brand could enhance their e-commerce platform is through highlighting and integrating their social media to the platform. The brand’s sister brand, Free People does an excellent job of this. Free People allows customers to hashtag the name of the product they are wearing and the photo stream is automatically uploaded to the product’s display page. They also allow customers to upload photos of themselves in the product directly to the web page, in the event the user does not have an Instagram or does not want to hashtag the product name. Similar to product reviews, this establishes authenticity of the products and will allow customers to see the products on “regular people” instead of models, ultimately driving sales. 3. Frequency of emails. The final suggestion I have to improve the brand’s digital presence is by implementing an Air Traffic Control (ATC) system that tracks individuals’ interactions with the brand and sends emails accordingly. The ATC system could also help in customizing content for emails based on not only the frequency of interaction but also the types of interactions consumers take part in. This would help eliminate the daily cadence for those who are not interested and ultimately, provide users with only the content they care about. In addition to implementing a ATC system, Anthropologie should allow customers to select the frequency of emails they wish to receive at the beginning of their subscription, opposed to when a recipient wants to unsubscribe. Similar to the ATC system, this would allow the recipient to customize their content based on what is important to them and increase their satisfaction with the communications they receive.
10