A Walk Through Deckers Brands Current CRM Practices

An analysis on the fashion and performance lifestyle group’s basic relationship marketing tactics

June 2, 2021

Welcome back to PostFunnel’s 45^th episode of the 7 CRM Commandment Series. Today, we get to Deckers – the name behind well-known brands like UGG, Teva shoes, Hoka, and more.

Ready for a stroll? Take a walk through the seven commandments to reveal how Deckers Brands scores.

1. Be Transparent 6/10

The following statement accompanied the company’s recent financial reports: “Fiscal 2021 was an exceptional year for Deckers, led by global growth of the HOKA brand and broad-based demand for the head-to-toe assortment of UGG brand products,” said Dave Powers, President, and Chief Executive Officer. “While our fourth quarter benefited from certain macro tailwinds as well as lapping last year’s disruption, the health of our brands, strength of our omni-channel organization, and our digitally focused long-term strategies provided the foundation for success over the past year, accelerating our growth trajectory. We are excited for the year ahead as we invest in the long-term evolution of Deckers to drive sustainable top and bottom-line growth.” Such statements are worth a few points here since they provide a bit of an insight into what the company prioritizes in terms of its business strategy. But for a brand to really give the public the feeling that there are people behind it, more needs to be done.

2. Incentives and Perks 5/10

For this commandment, let’s check the UGG brand.

Right off the bat, we noticed that the iconic Australian boot maker is rewarding its existing customers with UGG Rewards.

Though the brand does have a Master Sale section on its website, with products priced down significantly – we didn’t notice any other promotions/discounts/newsletter offer/ first-time purchase offer/ general sales/bonus codes/etc. being promoted on the site. That’s a huge minus!

3. Be Relevant 8/10

Let’s check whether HOKA – the premium performance footwear and athletic apparel brand, is portraying brand relevancy as far as how customers expect brands they shop with to behave.

We noticed the brand offering Free Delivery & Free Returns – which are likely to make the online shopping experience much simpler and more convenient – something customers expect these days.

In addition, the brand is asking customers to “Join Us In Solidarity By Shopping Local.” When clicking on the link that appears on the top of the brand’s HP ticker – you are redirected to find the closest Hoka store near you. Again, a nice way to show customers it cares for local businesses.

We deducted just a couple of points here because we expected the brand to mention a timelier topic on their HP – like Pride Month and/or Father’s Day.

4. Be Helpful 10/10

Modern consumers want to feel like the brands that they shop with understand them. Like all of us, they want to feel seen and heard and want a genuine connection. For that to happen, brands need to show how they’re giving back to the community and being helpful to the planet, society, or communities in general.

This time, we chose to check if Teva Shoes is being helpful. Guess what? We found that the brand is supporting the LGBT+ community with its newly launched Take Pride collection.

It also offers customers the ability to recycle sandals – which is a great way to power sustainability and reduce waste in landfills. With Teva Forever, the brand is offering customers a “new life for old soles.” Here’s what it says on their website:

Your sandals have a soul of their own, shaped by every wild adventure you’ve weathered together. And when they’re well-worn and ready to retire, they’ve never had a great place to go—until now.

The process involves three steps:

Teva’s initiative is obviously a great way to be environmentally friendly and cater to that large group of conscious consumers!

5. Realtime Personalization 4/10

Let’s take a look at Deckers’ Sanuk – the Southern California surf culture and global lifestyle brand – to see whether they have their realtime personalization tactics in place.

Here’s how we checked it:

After adding sandals from the Sanuk’s Grateful Dead collection to our shopping cart, we clicked on the continue shopping button. This led us to the “Women’s best-seller” sandals page that includes both a color widget on the side for us to narrow down and filter our search results (personalizing our experience) as well as a wide array of sandals to choose from the same category:

The downside was that no cross-selling and up-selling tactics were implemented by the brand when they had us in the shopping cart. Surely, Sanuk could have easily prompted us with a message to match the sandals with another product that would go great with them, either from that brand or from the group’s other brands.

Finally, when exiting the site and going onto social media, we didn’t see any paid social ads by the brand in realtime.

TIP: By adding personalized recommendations to your marketing campaigns, you can increase the likelihood of a customer returning to your site by 300% and reduce the unsubscribe rate by approximately 65%. The same rules should apply to your site!

6. Master UX 8/10

For this commandment, let’s check whether the fashion lifestyle brand from Deckers – Koola Burra – provides customers with a positive user experience.

Navigating through the different categories of the website was easy and fun. Free shipping and return details can easily be found at the top left-hand corner of the HP and when clicking on the banner, you gain access to all shipping details needed to make a purchase:

Finding the customer service contact details and hours of operation was clear and straightforward as we simply scrolled down to the bottom of the site’s HP. The help center itself provides customers with three convenient methods to speak with a representation of their choice:

We deducted a few points here simply because we felt the 10% off banner below that appeared several times throughout our user journey was quite intrusive:

7. Leverage Social Media 9/10

Let’s take a look here at Teva again. On Facebook, Teva Shoes has 493K likes; on Instagram, it has 556K followers and on Twitter – nearly 20K.

Customers use all of these channels — and more — to stay up to date with their favorite brands, and those brands need to reciprocate and be active on all channels on a daily basis.

Teva seems to be doing an excellent job at leveraging their social media accounts.

On Instagram, the brand highlights the various causes it cares for in its Story Highlights as shown below:

On Facebook, the brand posted a timely human rights campaign to support the LGBT+ community:

Finally, on Twitter, Teva posts the same content as the above two channels – but they do so frequently and on relevant and timely matters to strategically engage customers and fans.

A little more content dedicated to each specific channel would give them the extra point missing here for a perfect score.

Overall, Deckers is getting a 50/70 here (71%), placing them in 26^th place – in a tie with Inditex and Iceland Foods!

It’s clear that a major upgrade could come from upping their Realtime Personalization game.

All brands must always remember: Growing through your existing customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, and the right personalization capabilities can increase customer lifetime value by 33%!

Here are the full rankings of all the brands we analyzed to date:

We publish a new analysis every other week, so watch this space for more brand analyses coming your way!