Wunderkind Success Story: Wolverine Worldwide

Rachel Waldstein: I am Rachel Waldstein. I am the Senior Director of Customer Lifetime Value at Wolverine Worldwide. We have a portfolio of footwear brands. My job is keeping the customer for our eCommerce portfolio. I head up MarTech, CRM, CRM strategy and retention strategy and the retention channels for all of our brands. There's so much opportunity. The opportunity to work within a portfolio means that there is always a new challenge. Yes, it's all footwear, but it's all different, and so the opportunity that I have every day to come in and try new things, test new things like Wunderkind. I don't need all of my brands to buy in order to go do something like that. I only need one of them. And so the opportunity to jump on projects like that is really fun. Coming out of the pandemic, the business challenges were vast. Obviously, 2020 completely shifted the way that the consumer shops. They shifted to eCommerce and then they went back to brick and mortar, and now there's this debate about where they're going to be for this holiday season. And so when we are able to drive traffic to our site, knowing who that consumer is so we can drive that personalized experience is really important, and a company like Wunderkind really allows us to do that. So the opportunity to bring them on and recognize our consumer as soon as they got there was huge, and we've built on that. Well, we were able to increase send volume of site abandonment emails by 300% when launching Wunderkind, and just delivering that experience, we're able to see email revenue, which is obviously an incredibly efficient channel increase depending on the brand, somewhere between 15% and 20% of total site revenue, which allows our media dollars to go farther. So the opportunity to keep that consumer that comes to site, and make sure that that traffic that we pay for comes back, was just really impactful so that we could invest as intelligently as we possibly could in a changing market. So we were previously with Bluecore. We then moved over to our Salesforce platform and leveraged their Einstein capability within that. While the email performs the same, it's the ability to recognize the consumer onsite that Wunderkind provides us that is so impactful. 300% more emails. Yeah. And they perform the same. So the revenue per thousand, that productivity metric is the same as it was on Einstein as it is with Wunderkind. So we're just doing a whole lot more, and we expected the productivity to fall off, but it really didn't. Own- channel marketing for us is really important, especially as we play in the wholesale space. And so I can tell you that our wholesalers absolutely recognized, for better or worse, when we launched Wunderkind, because they have people that are especially going to independent- running retailers or the Boot Barn or things like that, people who are coming to our sites to check out the product first and then getting those abandonment emails right away. It allows us to drive those brand experiences, and we have been able to capture just so much more of that traffic and also balance that with our wholesale partners. When I talk to my team at Wunderkind, it's all about knowing what source they're coming from and how I can increase that level of personalization so that I can only be offering the discount to the consumer that needs it versus everybody. That is going to be so important for us so that we can drive what the consumer wants in their boot or wants in their sneakers. Is it all about: are they a marathon runner? Are they a first- time 5K? And the store associate can help them with that, and we will be able to just close that sale on our product versus a competitor wherever we are. Greatest value that Wunderkind brings is knowing that I am delivering that personalized experience to my consumer, and I have confidence that unlike some other products that we've been with, that every time we come back and we get a weird consumer experience, because employees often get weird consumer experiences, that we are given such straightforward answers of why something happened. And that gives me confidence that the consumer journey that is more straightforward than an employee's experience on site is really strong. Well, Wunderkind's dataset creeps me out. No, I think in talking to the team at Wunderkind, the vast amount of data that you guys have is really intriguing to me. It's what makes your roadmap interesting to me and it's what makes the idea that we can be driving this incredibly personalized experience to the betterment of the consumer and the betterment of the business at the same time possible, which I don't think there are a lot of other vendors out there that are able to do that. They're able to say, " You came to site to have a site experience," or, " You went into a store to have a store experience." And being able to figure out what the consumer is really trying to do at one time is going to be so important for businesses like ours that are trying to grow our owned eCommerce and working towards that, but also understand that the consumer is going to go in store and we do need to be competitive on the shelves with other brands. One of my favorite parts of my Wunderkind relationship is the strategy that the Wunderkind team brings to me. With all of my brands, we are able to run so many different tests across the board and we've been able to learn so much in such a rapid fashion that we're able to very quickly deploy them into other brands and leverage the insights for wins in other channels as well. I think that the number of tests that the Wunderkind team brings my team is almost overwhelming. There are so many of them, but we've been able to learn so much about what works and what doesn't in a really rapid fashion, and been able to deploy that to other parts of our consumer journey, both digital and other email programs as well. The value prop of Wunderkind is that you're going to deliver a percentage of revenue every month, and you do, and that's what we're looking for, and that, like I said, the ideas just keep coming of how we can do better and better and grow that percentage of revenue. Wunderkind's ability to recognize whether it's a prospect or a customer allows us to personalize that experience, making sure that we are not talking about their first purchase. If they purchase before and they're buying the same thing, adding more content around that is huge for us and something that we are looking to build on. One of the things I love about working with Wunderkind, like I mentioned earlier, is just you guys are really creative and the opportunity to bring data- backed ideas and then push the envelope with them. I feel like every time Sarah, who's my CSM, brings me an idea, I push her one step further to say, " Oh, and we could do this," and she looks at me like, " Oh, Rachel, come on." But that you're always able to meet that or we're able to try something like that is because the data's there and the platform works, and for us, that's huge.