ABOUT THE VENDOR
Funded by Cisco Systems, Atlas Venture and Menlo Ventures, Fireclick provides Web Experience
Management solutions. The company was founded in 1999 by three French graduate students at Stanford
University and is based in Los Altos, CA. Customers include Victoria's Secret, J.C. Penney, and
General Mills.
ABOUT THE CUSTOMER
Founded in 1998, Bare Necessities is an Internet retailer for women's brand name intimate apparel.
Through its Internet store, Bare Necessities sells hundreds of styles of bras, panties and
sleepwear, from 50 leading manufacturers such as Wacoal, Bali and Vanity Fair. Bare Necessities
also operates five lingerie specialty stores in the northeastern United States.
ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY
Netflame combines content acceleration, Web analytics, and Web performance monitoring into a single
application service called Web Experience Management that requires no hardware, software, or
ongoing maintenance. Netflame accelerates the delivery of Web pages by two to ten times faster
through predictive caching technology. Netflame's Realtime Insite reporting tools provide real-time
and historical reports on traffic patterns, site performance statistics, and customer demographic
statistics, and provides an outsourced and streamlined log-file aggregation service.
Bare Necessities was looking for a Web analytics solution to help it understand what
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works and what
doesn't on its Web site and to improve its customers' Web experience. SearchCRM spoke with Bill
Richardson, COO and president of Bare Necessities, about the project.-------------------------------------------------
SearchCRM: How many vendors did you look at?
Richardson: We looked at a couple. But this is one of those things where Fireclick called us and said that this was really something that could help us a lot. They sold us on the improved speed and the real-time Web tracking.
SearchCRM: Why did you choose them over the other vendors you considered?
Richardson: I think the biggest thing was the tools they have to look at the data. They just keep so much data on what our customers are doing on our Web site, and the tools for us to be able to see what that data looks like are very sophisticated. They've got a local site explorer that puts little percent graphics up on our images on the version of the site that we're looking at to show the frequency with which people are clicking on certain things. It's super immediate feedback, and you don't have to wade through big piles of data.
SearchCRM: How did the implementation go?
Richardson: It was unbelievably fast. It literally took us ten minutes. There are two pieces to the technology -- one runs on our server and one runs on the client. So really all we have to do is include those pieces on our Web site so the client downloads it when they're requesting the page. For us, it was simple as including something they sent us into one of our footer files, and we were done.
SearchCRM: Can you describe how you use the Fireclick solution?
Richardson: Day to day, we use it for marketing. The marketing team makes changes for campaigns, like certain sales that are going on or certain vendors that are promoting new products. They're able to get super fast feedback on the efficacy of things even as simple as a picture. Is the picture drawing attention? We've learned things like people click on red bras more than they click on white bras. So we make an effort now to include more color on the pages that we want people to be more interested in.
We're also always trying to make changes to the Web site to optimize the shopping experience. If we make a change to the site navigation, we can see if it improves the way the customer is able to navigate the site. In October we redid our entire site and put tabs at the top and improved the left navigation bar. We had plenty of internal discussions about what was most effective -- the top tabs or the left nav bar. The data proved that the left nav bar was much more effective than we thought.
Another thing we have is a link to our stores. We really had no idea if people were using that. With the Fireclick tool, you can go to any page on your Web site and find out what were the most frequently clicked links. So we were able to find which stores people were looking for the most. Also, from the page that links to the list of stores, we were surprised at how often people clicked through on that. People are really looking for a business that they can shop at both online and at the store. Also, we do radio campaigns, and we're able to see an increased number of clicks to the page with the list of stores. So if we run a commercial in Norwalk, CT, we'll see that the Norwalk store link will become more popular for the duration of that campaign. So it's kind of a reassurance that our marketing money is being spent wisely.
SearchCRM: When do you expect to see ROI?
Richardson: I think within a couple of months we should have a lot of data so we can see what site changes have been most effective, and we can extend them to more places. We set goals in terms of what it would take to make [the solution] profitable based on what we pay monthly, and we haven't necessarily been profitable from the start in respect to this tool, but we're definitely heading that way. It's paying off month over month.
SearchCRM: What's been the most rewarding result of the solution so far?
Richardson: To be able to make some modifications to the look and feel of the site or the site navigation and to get feedback fairly quickly as to how that affects the customer experience.
SearchCRM: What are your future plans?
Richardson: We're working on using it more to judge the effectiveness of not only e-mail campaigns, but also different messages we put into the e-mail campaigns. For example, what works better, HTML or straight text?
SearchCRM: What advice do you have for companies thinking of starting a similar project?
Richardson: First and foremost, the company has to be at a certain point where this makes sense. A year ago, we wouldn't have done this. But with where we are with our staff and our sales, it was something that was definitely appetizing.
It's also important to have the time to use it. It can sit there on the shelf, and you're not doing anybody good unless you're actually not only analyzing the data, but also changing things based on that.
Linda Formichelli's writing has appeared in Woman's Day, Wired, Writer's Digest, Family Circle, Psychology Today. Contact her at linda-eric@lserv.com, or check out her Web site http://www.twowriters.net
This was first published in May 2002