Dear Ms. Mary Alderete, Chief Marketing Officer at Gap inc.,
I’m writing to you because on April 22nd, 2021, we at PostFunnel – a publication dedicated to everything relationship marketing – analyzed your brand’s site experience according to the “7 commandments for basic CRM”.
These are the basic principles that brands should follow in today’s zeitgeist to improve their chances of building meaningful customer relationships.
You can read more about the method at the bottom of this page.
Since we ran the CRM analysis on your brand a few months back, we wanted to revisit it today to see what has changed. After all, we know these things are dynamic.
You can find the original analysis here.
Back in April, Gap scored a solid 77% – which, at the time, was enough for 18th place among the 43 brands we analyzed by then. Now, 58 brands into the series, Gap is at joint 20th (ties with Blue Apron and Angie’s List).
With perfect scores of 10 for 10 on the 3 categories of Transparency, Incentives and Perks, and Helpfulness, and another 9 on Relevancy, it’s clear that when it comes to the major corporate-level initiatives, the communication efforts that find their ways to the main headlines, Gap is exceptionally on point with what is expected of such a major brand these days.
So, we won’t revisit those.
We will start, though, with the Social Media commandment, where we look to see how brands are leveraging social media to nurture long-term, meaningful customer relationships.
Leveraging Social Media – from 4 to 5/10
Back in April, Gap scored a well below average 4 out of 10, mostly since it was basically not really active neither on Facebook nor Twitter. Checking these pages again now, we see the last FB post went up September 7th, more than a month ago. And the latest tweet is from late June. We understand that maybe these channels are used for customer support, but by posting content so sporadically on these platforms, you are for sure doing more damage to your brand than basically going with any other strategy. This, again, causes a bunch of points here.
The diverse, colorful, socially aware, and just plain straightforward and helpful content on your Instagram page could be worth 5 points by itself. A score we are willing to give it.
Unfortunately, with that uncharacteristic activity on the two other major platforms, the overall score here for how Gap is using social media to nurture customer relationships is capped at that number – 5 of 10.
(also, Gap had 9.4M likes on Facebook 6 months ago. It’s at 9.2M now. Twitter following is down 10K to 618K. IG – up from 3 to 3.1M followers)
Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: Monitoring the User’s Heartbeat
What Does It Mean to Treat a Customer’s Email With Respect?
To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)
What the Efforts to Promote Responsible Gaming Look Like Form the Inside
UX – stays 7/10
Second, we look at your site’s UX, where we judge ease of use, utilities, and whether the site’s experience within itself provides a reason to come back to visit the site (or, never to).
Going through virtually every possible page on your site, our main takeaway is that gap.com offers a somewhat predictable combination of good practicality with unmemorable character.
On one hand, the entire navigation has many smart tiny features that just make everything simple (for example, automatically “remember” our last click on the main menu).
On the other hand, design is clunky, copy is bland, and it’s common to encounter tiny issues such as these two buttons at the bottom of this popup being cut-off (there’s an in-pop-up scroll here that allows you to “find” the missing part of the buttons). See below:
For these reasons, we can not go above 7, which is what we scored the site’s UX last time, too.
Realtime Personalization – from 4 to 2/10
And, finally, we get to the all-critical Realtime Personalization commandment. This is where we look to see which parts of the experience of visiting the site, browsing product pages, adding items to the cart, and checking out – are personalized. We also hop off the site and onto our social media accounts to see if we are being retargeted quickly, or just left to our own devices.
Last time, this is where Gap scored the lowest, with 4 out of 10 (same as the original Social Media score). Without any realtime personalization efforts that we could spot or feel during our site visit whatsoever, and without any recognizable retargeting efforts, we gave 4 points for the robust “people also bought” widgets.
But, as these are not really personalized, not offering cross-selling opportunities to the company’s other brands, and at the same time – scoring Gap favorably for these widgets could easily be going towards the solid UX.
All this is just meant to say: nothing really has changed since April, but we are still reducing points here. Also, because in the past 6 months one thing has changed: the industry kept going forward, and customers’ expectations kept growing, too. So, in other words, what was enough for a “4” a while ago, is not more than a 2 today.
If we go with a 2/10 for Realtime Personalization, it means in total our new analysis adds up to the same final score Gap got from us back in April.
And, again, in an ultra-competitive space, not moving forward is equivalent to going backward.
Brands that prioritize CRM Marketing as a cross-company strategic initiative can see a 33% increase in Customer Lifetime Value.
To learn more about how you and the entire Gap group can take full advantage of all the latest, cutting-edge realtime marketing personalization and customer segmentation practices, feel free to reach out to me at any time. This is what we go to work for evey day here for years now.
Cheers, Amit Bivas, VP Marketing at Optimove
**
About the 7 Commandments for Basic CRM Tactics in A Post-Coronavirus World:
We have a saying here at PostFunnel: All marketing is relationship marketing. Why? Because every touchpoint with a potential customer impacts the kind of relationship they will have with a brand, if and when they become customers. Even branding has. It’s like what people hear about their upcoming blind-date can determine the actual meeting’s success.
In recent years, it meant that the ways brands support global, social, environmental, and even political causes have become increasingly critical to their relationships with customers.
Then, 2020 happened. With its global pandemic’s tragedy, economic downturn, and historical social and political turmoils – people turned their eyes to brands, almost as much as they have to governments. Expecting and judging brands by how they conduct themselves throughout such events was never more crucial to a company’s CRM success.
One after the other, the internet got flooded with articles advising marketing and CRM leaders on how to make sure their brand is suited for this new reality. So, we combed dozens of them – and came up with a list of 7 staples that appeared in most of those articles.
The seven most essential commandments a brand must follow these days to make sure they put themselves in the best position possible to develop long, meaningful relationships with their customers.
The 7 Commandments:
1) Transparency. Show the human side of your brand
2) Give incentives and perks (that make sense)
3) Be relevant (with your language, offering)
4) Be helpful (improve your communities’ lives)
5) Personalize in realtime (cause, duh)
6) Master UX (slow, clunky websites are no longer an option)
7) Leverage social media (don’t just treat it as a sales channel)
Yup, that’s all. Without being at least decent at all of these, your CRM efforts will struggle to achieve their full potential.
And, let’s be honest, it’s not too much to ask of a brand, right?
Yet, you’d be surprised how many well-known brands fall short too often when analyzed through these lenses.
Still, it makes some sense – these changes are happening fast, and not all brands can react and adapt quickly enough and on all fronts.
And we’re here to follow these reactions and adjustments as they happen.