Politix Offers Customers a Tailor-made Online Experience

Politix is an Australian menswear brand known for its high quality, fashion-forward clothes, including tailored suits and formal wear. It opened its first shop on Chapel Street in Melbourne in 1975 and now has stores and concessions across the country.

Richard Dalke, Head of Marketing at Politix, shared that the in-store experience is a huge factor in the brand’s success and differentiates it from high volume retailers, where shoppers are left to sift through racks of clothes on their own.

“As a brand, we offer affordable luxury and a very hands-on experience,” said Dalke. “We have highly engaged retail teams who greet you when you come into the store, ask what occasion you’re shopping for and put outfits together for you,” said Dalke.

Politix is on its way to creating an online experience to match and has significantly increased its percentage of sales derived from ecommerce. Salesforce underpins this online experience and has given Politix the technology and agility to drive continual improvements in engagement and conversion.

When Politix launched its first ecommerce site, the platform it used offered basic functionality and made it difficult for the brand to showcase itself in a compelling way. The site was not mobile responsive either, meaning the brand had to invest extra time and money maintaining a separate site for mobile. Even then, Politix was not getting the conversion it wanted.

“The business decided it needed to get more serious about ecommerce and invest in a platform that would elevate the brand in the online space,” said Ivette Mendez, Digital Marketing Manager at Politix. “We wanted to create a mobile first site that was designed for storytelling and would showcase our brand and products in the best possible way.”

With a team of two managing ecommerce, the platform also had to be easy to manage and easy to scale. Commerce Cloud ticked all the right boxes and Politix went live on the platform in July 2015, six months from the start of its tender process. The difference was felt immediately, with the team freed up from maintaining a separate mobile site and able to invest their time in optimising the online experience.

One of the major benefits of Commerce Cloud has been the efficiency with which Politix can update its site. Changes to landing pages or product prices can be applied in one hour as compared to two to three days previously, increasing the speed and ease at which Politix can launch promotions.

Politix has also created custom site features to better merchandise its products and overcome particular challenges in selling menswear online. For example, the brand sold next to zero suits through its first site, with customers preferring to find their ideal fit in-store. However, with a new online section called suit separates, Politix was able to better guide customers through the purchase process and increase online suit sales by 30%.

Another benefit for Politix has been increased visibility into search performance. It can now see what its customers are searching for and optimise its site accordingly. This has helped the brand to ensure meaningful results for 97% of searches on its site, as opposed to before when many searches came up empty.

“We’re continuing to trend up when it comes to search performance and it’s an important metric as we know that customers who use search are more likely to convert,” said Mendez.

Salesforce has helped Politix maximise the benefits of Commerce Cloud by providing hands-on training and technical support. In 2018, Politix engaged Salesforce to carry out an audit of the site to identify any roadblocks to conversion and opportunities to improve.

The implementation of the audit actions combined with all of the previous improvements boosted site conversion to approximately 90% higher than the benchmark for similar menswear brands at the time.

Politix’ most recent leap in conversion has come from integrating order management capabilities from Techsys into Commerce Cloud and switching on in-store fulfillment. This has enabled the brand to increase the amount of inventory online, helping to double conversion rates.

“Traffic to the site has increased by 25% over the last year, while sales have grown 89% and a large part of that success has come from unlocking the product inventory that sits in our stores,” said Paul Watson, Digital Manager, Witchery and Politix.

Politix is also now using Marketing Cloud to increase customer engagement, online and offline. Leveraging Commerce Cloud and data collected in-store for e-receipts, Politix is building a 360 degree view of customers which it can use to tailor campaigns and journeys.

One of the first of these personalised campaigns was a Black Friday promotion sent to the brand’s most engaged customers. Combined with other marketing activities, the promotion resulted in online sales of 223% above weekly average and 142% above the previous year.

In the coming year, Politix also plans to leverage Marketing Cloud for loyalty, helping it get closer to customers while also increasing the frequency and value of their transactions.

Reflecting on this and all of the achievements Politix has made in the online space, Dalke acknowledged the importance of having a platform that was able to scale alongside the business.

“One of the most powerful things about Salesforce is how it’s grown with us as our priorities have changed from set-up to scale and now loyalty and omni-channel,” said Dalke. “The other important thing is that we’re now running it. The team has built up an incredible amount of technical knowledge that will help us keep moving forward.”