Download Your home decor store

Adobe Marketing Cloud Success Story
Kirkland’s
Your home decor store
Adobe Marketing Cloud helps Kirkland’s deliver more relevant
search results to customers and increase online revenues by 30%
Kirkland’s
Nashville, Tennessee
www.kirklands.com
Results
• Increased revenue per customer 30%
• Reduced unsuccessful searches
from 11,000 per week to fewer than
100 per week
• Identified and fixed problems
causing inaccurate, incomplete, or
confusing search results
• Successfully replicated the richness
of in-store shopping experiences
online
• Streamlined social campaign
management and content publishing
• Gained real-time insights into social
channels, helping to improve
timeliness and relevance of
interactions
Since Carl Kirkland founded the company that bears his name in 1966, Kirkland’s
has worked to distinguish itself from competing retailers by offering customers a
wide selection of new products and experiences. Regularly updating its inventory
of reasonably priced home décor products helps surprise and delight customers,
keeping them coming back to discover new hidden gems for their homes. To help
ensure richer online experiences that match the satisfaction shoppers can experience
when browsing through Kirkland’s more than 300 brick-and-mortar stores across
the United States, Kirkland’s has turned to Adobe Marketing Cloud.
“From a merchandising inventory standpoint, our products turn over quickly. Our customers know that
if they see something they like in one of our stores or on our online site, they should buy it because it
might not be available tomorrow,” says Karen Light, merchandising manager at Kirkland’s. “The digital
challenge had been optimizing our website to emulate our in-store experiences. Since implementing
Adobe Marketing Cloud, we’ve been very successful.”
Kirkland’s uses several capabilities within Adobe Analytics, including marketing reports, in-depth
analysis of customers’ online interaction data, and the solution’s data workbench and data connectors.
To improve returns on digital marketing initiatives, Kirkland’s relies on Adobe Experience Manager for
dynamic media and personalized media, site search and merchandising capabilities in Adobe Target.
Kirkland’s also leverages capabilities within Adobe Social to help drive their social media business.
Overcoming a slow start
Kirkland’s has experimented with e-commerce for nearly a decade. But mixed results from early
websites discouraged management from aggressively pursuing it. Nevertheless, the company
continued to experiment, understanding the significant opportunities available.
Early on, Kirkland’s created a website in which customers could order from an online catalog and
then pick up their order at a retail store. After six months of regular success, Kirkland’s decided to
expand its e-commerce potential. Ultimately, the company hired a digital merchandising manager
and a site operations manager, who both helped implement Adobe solutions.
“Adobe Marketing Cloud offers easy-to-use, well-integrated solutions,” says site operations manager
Erica LeBlanc. “We looked at several products and determined that we wanted a comprehensive site
search and merchandising tool that did not require any third-party involvement.”
Specifically, Kirkland’s liked the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model from Adobe, which didn’t
require Kirkland’s to set up and maintain servers. Additionally, Adobe provided the company with
digital campaign design and launch expertise, which helped the retailer understand key concepts,
including how the mobile website needed to differ from the regular site.
“Adobe came in here and clearly understood our challenges, and the team stood behind the quality
and capabilities of Adobe products,” says LeBlanc. “We could see how Adobe solutions could be
used together to offer our customers compelling, higher-impact digital experiences.”
Using Adobe Marketing Cloud, Kirkland’s marketers have greater
insight into customer behaviors and preferences, as well as increased
control over site optimizations and search capabilities.
Challenge
• Creating a website with simple,
powerful search functions
• Improving accuracy of search
results delivered to customers
• Creating a digital experience of
searching for merchandise that
emulates the discovery and delight
of in-store experiences
• Increasing customer engagement
across social channels
Solution
Implement Adobe Marketing Cloud
solutions to improve customer
engagement, search performance,
the quality of online pages, and social
media impact
Systems at a glance
Adobe Marketing Cloud. Capabilities
used include: •Adobe Analytics
•Adobe Experience Manager
•Adobe Social
•Adobe Target
Immediate improvements realized
Soon after implementing Adobe Marketing Cloud, the Kirkland’s team used Adobe Analytics and Adobe
Target to identify several areas for improvement. For instance, Adobe Analytics revealed problems
with some search terms, such as searches for the word “mirrors” being unsuccessful 80% of the time.
Kirkland’s was able to share the data with its website developer, who quickly fixed the problem.
Adobe Analytics also helped reveal other technical issues, such as null searches when a customer
didn’t enter an initial “0” for item numbers beginning with “0.” The solution also helped identify
how searches for certain products might yield unrelated results, presenting potential customers
with products that simply shared the first two letters of their search description.
Analysis of other unsuccessful search terms has helped Kirkland’s modify its library of terms. The
company found that it wasn’t including terms used by customers to search for products.
“We now offer new products because Adobe Analytics provided us with actionable data about what
our customers really want,” LeBlanc says. “Not only did we reclassify the products we already carry,
but we also added more products to meet customer demand.”
After redesigning its home page using insights gained from Adobe Analytics, revenue per customer
has increased 30%. Furthermore, the number of searches on the Kirkland’s website has increased
9.2% per week, while the number of unsuccessful searches weekly has dropped from more than
11,000 to less than 100.
Replicating the in-store experience
Kirkland’s has set for itself the challenge of making the online shopping experience as much like
the in-store experience as possible. The typical Kirkland’s customer is a woman in her forties or
fifties who might be less comfortable shopping online than younger consumers.
Because of its customers’ demographics, the company needed to make site navigation elements
clearer and easier to use. It also meant enhancing the logical elements of search in the user interface
through testing. With Adobe Marketing Cloud, Kirkland’s can manage and test all site elements it
deems important, eliminating the need for a third-party vendor for development.
“With Adobe solutions, we can set ranking rules, such as listing new products first and clearance
products at the bottom,” says LeBlanc. “We make the relevancy rules for search to do things like
give a product name higher weight than a product description. We can also set business rules to
improve the accuracy of search results. For example, we can be sure that mirrors are shown before
mirrored furniture when somebody searches for ‘mirrors.’”
In the near future, Kirkland’s plans to integrate additional Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions,
including Adobe Social, to increase engagement with customers and drive website traffic.
“The digital challenge
had been optimizing
our website to
emulate our in-store
experiences. Since
implementing Adobe
Marketing Cloud,
we’ve been very
successful.”
Karen Light,
Merchandising manager,
Kirkland’s
Multichannel impact
The next stage of Kirkland’s digital marketing initiatives will focus on expanding the company’s
social presence and improving its multichannel marketing efforts. Kirkland’s customers are already
passionate about the brand because of their in-store experiences and the high-quality experience
online. Kirkland’s expects Adobe Social to be a key component in further engaging existing and
potential customers through digital channels.
“We are starting to use Adobe Social to look at our most active online social sites and biggest
influencers to better determine the types of promotions that do well in social channels,” says Jessica
Charlton, communications manager at Kirkland’s. “We were initially inspired by a fortunate accident,
when home bloggers began telling friends via Facebook that they were delighted after finding our
brand. Using Adobe Social and the rest of Adobe Marketing Cloud, we can not only identify those
conversations early, but amplify messaging to get even more people excited about and interacting
with our brand.”
At the center of the Kirkland’s social strategy is its own blog, where experts and bloggers provide
inspiration for home décor, entertaining, gifts, and do-it-yourself projects, as well as promote store
giveaways and contests. Using Adobe Social, content authors leverage content developed with
WordPress, then promote it across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+. Additionally, social
content can be repurposed to engage customers via email and the Kirkland’s retail site to increase
the value of each post.
In addition to one-click publishing to multiple social sites, social scheduling functions have significantly
enhanced how social campaigns are managed. Social marketers can pre-develop content, and then
plan which day and at what time content is delivered to maximize the content’s impact and reach.
Integration across Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions enable content managers to also measure and
share impact numbers from social campaigns across channels with retail managers. “We use all of the
data we can collect with Adobe Social—including community growth and revenue numbers,” says
Charlton. “The data and insights give us a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
We’re continually optimizing experiences and can experiment with new ideas to see what content
and channels positively impact the bottom line.”
Advanced reporting tools also support faster communication with decision makers, increasing
business agility at Kirkland’s. By quickly responding to dips and spikes in social behavior, social
marketers can respond to customer demands and promote positive events. For example, when
conversations arise around a customer service or product issue, site managers can act quickly to
resolve the issue. Additionally, when customers discuss where they would like to see a new Kirkland’s
store, social teams can share these details with company development teams for further research.
“Adobe Marketing Cloud offers easy-to-use, well-integrated
solutions. We looked at several products and determined that
we wanted a comprehensive site search and merchandising
tool that did not require any third-party involvement.”
Erica LeBlanc, site operations manager, Kirkland’s
“By using Adobe Analytics capabilities along with Adobe Target and Adobe Social, we can capture
more information and quickly run tests to give us a better view of what our customers are doing and
what they want,” says LeBlanc. “The clear, in-depth insights that we gain through Adobe Marketing
Cloud will empower our teams to respond to customers faster with more relevant experiences.”
For more information
www.adobe.com/solutions/
customer-experience/webexperience-management
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
USA
www.adobe.com
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