Becoming an omnichannel shoe brand

Deichmann offers a wide variety of both in-house and external shoe brands providing clients with high quality footwear at a reasonable price. With the creation of the new Deichmann Digital division, the company is committed to offering its customers exciting and seamless shopping experiences across all platforms and channels – no matter which one they choose.

The road towards becoming a first-class omnichannel brand began with a comprehensive Data Discovery phase conducted by DEPT®’s Data & Intelligence experts. This critical step consisted of interviewing key stakeholders across several departments in order to get a full understanding of specific wants and needs as well as unearthing underlying issues throughout the organisation with a focus on their digital unit. Another essential component of this phase was to analyse parts of their IT infrastructure and data sources. Once this status quo assessment was completed, we presented the company with concrete recommendations on what tools to choose, which infrastructure to build, and what organisational measures to take in order to become truly data-driven.

During the Data Discovery phase, the hypothesis that Deichmann’s website tracking data was untrustworthy and not customised to their current needs was confirmed. To address this, DEPT® first created a Solution Design Document which mapped out the entire tracking plan for the site. Once implemented, this enabled the shoe brand to get a complete view of their website analytics making it much easier to understand how visitors are navigating their site and what content they are engaging with. However, these insights did not paint the full picture.

In order to fully understand the impact of each digital marketing channel individually and holistically, DEPT® built a Data Intelligence Hub for the company. This best-of-breed infrastructure is comprised of three key elements: the data integration via Fivetran and custom Python code, a data warehouse for which we used Snowflake on Azure, and the visualisation tool Tableau. The Data Intelligence Hub automatically collects and stores data from each marketing-related source including each individual marketing channel, internal data and website analytics to name a few. By having all this centralised and modelled to Deichmann’s specifications, they are now able to streamline the flow of information throughout their digital division, automate accurate reporting and can improve their decision-making process.

In order to maximise the impact of the Data Intelligence Hub and spread knowledge quickly across the organisation, we began training key employees on how to leverage the technology. Parallel to this, we assisted the brand in their recruiting endeavours by suggesting which profiles the company should seek out. This joint venture with their HR department also included interviewing key candidates and supplying role-specific assessments for interviewees making sure Deichmann was properly equipped to take full advantage of their new state-of-the-art tech stack.

With the Data Intelligence Hub at their fingertips, Deichmann understands their customers better than ever before. They now have timely access to trustworthy data which can be enhanced over time. The scalable infrastructure also makes it easy to add new data sources as Deichmann’s marketing mix evolves over time. This new-era, data-driven approach to decision making will also enable management to steer the company through its omnichannel transformation.

As of now, our focal point is to further enrich product and customer data so that an advanced digital marketing analysis can be performed in the future; with the help of machine learning, website visitors will be categorised based on their behavioural patterns, which determines whether or not retargeting budget will be allocated to them. However, this type of Data Science use case would not have been possible without these three foundational elements:

• accurate and dependable website tracking;
• modern and scalable BI infrastructure;
• skilled employees.

With these elements in place, Deichmann is poised to thrive as much online as they currently do offline whilst cementing their position as the market leader for shoes in Europe.