Jack Wills

Jack Wills has been measuring and making use of store footfall data since 2012. In autumn 2018 the company committed to migrating onto the latest version of ShopperTrak’s reporting and analytics platform, the ShopperTrak Analytics Suite. A plan to upgrade the traffic counting hardware in stores was also set in motion, as part of a five-year contract renewal with ShopperTrak.

Tying in with the roll out of the ShopperTrak Analytics suite to all stores, Jack Wills’ management team collaborated with the ShopperTrak professional services team to devise and run a six-week instore incentive scheme, aimed at driving conversion improvements. The purpose of the Conversion Incentive program was threefold: to introduce the latest capabilities of ShopperTrak Analytics to a select number of pilot stores; to encourage everyday use of the portal and understand the benefits of it; and to incentivize the pilot stores to apply learnings from traffic data to improve conversion and therefore sales.

The incentive scheme ran for six weeks over the Christmas peak trading period (26/11/2018 – 06/01/2019), involving 12 of Jack Wills’ most successful city stores.

The incentive ran as a weekly ‘league’ style competition whereby two leagues of six would compete against each other on the basis of best improvement on conversion each week, when traffic data was compared to the previous week. After five weeks, the top stores then competed against each other for a final week which decided the winner. A prize was put in place for the winning team – a ‘Best Converting Store’ trophy, and a celebratory evening out for the entire team.

The incentive scheme was introduced to the 12 stores via a webinar which gave an overview of the ShopperTrak Analytics suite, explaining how to access and utilize the system. This as carried out the week before the incentive, and to ensure everyone was on board, further 1:1 sessions were carried out in the following days.

Each week the results were published, building a competitive element to the scheme, along with a mix of store-specific tips and generic good guidance. Stores were also called by phone and given help and advice from the ShopperTrak professional services team. Feedback on successes and challenges were also taken from the shop floor, and ShopperTrak was able to provide some basic analytics coaching. This proved to be a great opportunity to drill down into the data, and spot opportunities for store colleagues to action. The calls also maintained momentum and encouraged some healthy inter-store rivalry.

Some stores had lower traffic on Mondays and Tuesdays but a relatively high number of customers coming in to collect online orders or process returns. The advice was to be ready for these customers with conversation starters and purchase suggestions, which succeeded in maximizing that sales opportunity. There was also a big focus on Power Hours – when traffic reaches a daily or weekly peak – in each of the 12 stores. Activities and labor scheduling were aligned to the expected peaks in shopper numbers and tips on selling techniques during Power Hours given. Momentum in the competition built successfully with stores getting to grips with how they could use traffic data insights to understand opportunities and gaps in performance. The final was conducted over the New Year week and the ultimate winner was Nottingham.

KPIs for the six-week period, covering the peak trading Christmas season, were compared to the prior six weeks.
For the entire 97-store estate, results confirmed that footfall and sales had increased as would be expected in Q4, but Jack Wills were delighted to discover that additional successes came through for the 12 pilot stores.

“The new platform has made accessing the hourly data, and visualizing trends so simple. This helped me to engage with even the newest colleagues who were less familiar with conversion and footfall data. All the team are proud of this win, and are looking to keep up our place of Best Converting Store!” – Carl, store manager from the winning Jack Wills Nottingham store

Activities and labor scheduling were aligned to the expected peaks in shopper numbers, and tips on selling techniques during power hours were given to ensure maximum success for each store. These valuable insights helped the teams remove any guesswork from planning store operations and quickly became part of the daily routine for running the store and assisting customers and critically driving store performance.

• All stores sales increased, however pilot stores increased 39% better than the rest of the estate, a great increase even for the most successful stores.
• All stores conversion increased, however pilot stores increased 52% better than the rest of the estate.
• Sales per shopper (a measure of sales value spread across every visitor whether buying or not) decreased across the estate, as is typical at the busiest time of year. However the pilot stores managed to increase their SPS by 1.65%.

Click here to download a copy of the Jack Wills case study