Background

Shoe Carnival is one of the nation’s largest family footwear retailers, offering a broad assortment of moderately priced dress, casual and athletic footwear for men, women and children with emphasis on national and regional name brands. The company operates more than 400 stores in 33 states and Puerto Rico, and offers online shopping at ShoeCarnival.com.

Shoe Carnival wanted to rapidly grow enrollment in its loyalty program, as well as increase the size of its email subscriber list. Shoe Carnival saw great results when they made signups easier at the POS in-store, and wanted to extend that reach online. The goal was to accelerate growth beyond the walls of its own website, without sacrificing its strong organic user engagement metrics.

Campaign

Shoe Carnival teamed up with Fluent to run performance-based online and mobile ads which promoted enrollment in its Shoe Perks loyalty program. Leveraging the Fluent platform’s ability to ingest existing “most valuable customer” profile information, Shoe Carnival was able to target lookalikes of its best customers for acquisition, and also optimize its acquisition campaign in perpetuity based on ongoing performance analytics.

“Typically, consumer engagement with email prospecting is lower than with retention-based mailings, but we didn’t see that with Fluent. Engagement has been just as high, and in some cases, even higher, than with our standard campaigns.” – Michael Nuss, eCommerce Marketing Manager at Shoe Carnival

Results

Shoe Carnival rapidly grew its loyalty program membership and email database without sacrificing revenue per subscriber. In comparison with its organic efforts, click-to-open rates on welcome messages for Fluent-generated sign-ups were 13% higher than sign-ups through the website, and bounce rates were negligible (and also lower than on-site sign-ups).