How Salesforce Commerce Cloud Empowers Top Fashion Brands

It would be unusual if a digital giant like Salesforce declined to participate in the rapidly growing field of e-commerce. Not to mention sales and digital marketing.

Indeed, it is impossible to conceive a significant company that does not have any links with the Salesforce, "the world's #1 CRM".

Given also the popularity of Marketing, Sales, and Service Clouds, you can only imagine how much data Salesforce is hatching out.

With Commerce Cloud on top of this, Salesforce is just meant to boost the potential of any brand.

 

Why reputable fashion houses and top brands choose SFCC for ecommerce

 

In this article, we would like to analyze three cases of successful digital transformation for top fashion brands. What factors influenced their decision to use the Commerce Cloud platform over another? What do these brands have in common?

 

All of these brands have commonalities in some respects: Prior to their digital transformations, these reputable fashion houses had a huge army of loyal fans, whose trust they worked hard to build. And they wouldn't want to lose it for anything in the world.

 

Consequently, they had a mountain of data they wanted to put to better use with the proper reliable tools. Customer data which potential they wanted to unleash. Also, due to the sheer scale of their chains—thousands of outlets in hundreds of cities across dozens of countries—they need to be localized into dozens of languages. 

 

All of this is within the capabilities of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Let's take a deeper look. 

 

Guess

 

 

Challenge

 

Guess has been conducting its ever-expanding company in 100 countries with over 1600 outlets for a long time. Normally, they are well ahead of their goals. However, the difficulty to perform a digital transformation breaking down the information silos is always tough regardless of the company's pre-digital achievements.

 

With 16 million social media followers and 3.5 million customer records, Guess' biggest difficulty was figuring out how to make the massive quantity of data they gather work for them and deliver them profits. Guess gave a great deal of attention to the question of how to gather their data in a centralized location, with the end goal of having all of the data be unified and updated in a timely way.

 

Solution

Guess selected Commerce Cloud to build its shops in 48 countries on the platform. They powered up their digital environment by adding a variety of Salesforce services.

 

Personalization

 

Guess used cutting-edge AI advancements from Salesforce, such as Einstein, to improve personalization and the shopping experience for its customers; in particular, the company set up a system of personalized recommendations for online purchasers to boost conversion rates. 

 

Omni-channeling CX

 

Commerce Cloud and other Salesforce services made it simple to aggregate information about customers' purchases, behaviors, and preferences into a unified perspective (i.e., Salesforce allowed to always have all data pertaining to the brand readily available). Since it was now technically feasible to perform more precise cross- and up-sells, revenues soared to new heights. 

 

Improved customer journey

 

Guess added Social Studio and Service Cloud to its bundle of tools allowing their teams to monitor activity in social networks, instantly react to requests and consumer feedback. 

 

Marketing Cloud for greater precision and targeting

 

Leveraging Marketing Cloud, Guess was able to streamline and personalize their operations, bringing them closer to their target audience at the perfect moment.

 

Tracking marketing campaigns and doing A/B testing became a breeze with automation features.

 

Thanks to Marketing Cloud, Guess was able to more easily manage its many marketing initiatives and develop marketing communications in a variety of channels, identifying the most successful for each client without annoying them. 

 

Tableau and analytics

 

It would be a pity not to apply analytics when working with that much data: Guess gained better client insights, and more efficient operations, having added Salesforce Analytics (Tableau) Cloud to its digital environment.

 

Order Management

 

With Order Management service, Guess was able to get more insight into their supply chain, which was a major challenge given their global footprint and the hundreds of outlets they operate. 

 

Experience Cloud

 

At last, Guess had another important mission to complete: maintain excellent connections with wholesale buyers. The biggest issue – there are around 8000 of them. In order to keep effective communication with them, establishing an online community, Guess added Experience Cloud to its arsenal of technologies.

 

Impact

 

Guess successfully migrated to the Commerce Cloud platform in 48 countries, resulting in a 60% increase in online conversion rates. This achievement has more than compensated the loss of physical shops during the pandemic.

 

Guess was able to develop a more effective strategy for dealing with data while launching campaigns or communicating across many channels thanks to the Salesforce toolbox. This resulted in a considerable boost in engagement rates and ROI, among other things. 

 

Brunello Cucinelli

 

 

Challenge 

 

Brunello Cucinelli is a storied Italian fashion business with a rich heritage. They have a deep reverence for Solomeo, and their greatest hope in the modern day is to bring the warmth, friendliness, and responsiveness of their hometown to the online world.

 

The company's goal was to bring the genuineness of small Solomeo to the whole globe. To bring their nuanced approach to dealing with clients offline and onto the web, where the latter should feel appreciated but never compelled. Importantly, customers' confidence and the company's genuine vibe had to be protected during the digital transformation process.

 

Brunello Cucinelli also placed a high priority on protecting their customers' personal information. 

 

Solutions

 

Brunello Cucinelli relied on Salesforce and its suite of services to help them tackle complex problems.

 

Commerce Cloud 

 

Brunello Cucinelli had successfully launched online storefronts in 50 countries across the world. Commerce Cloud's features, well-known for their worldwide scalability and ease of use with numerous localizations, made this a reality.

 

Service Cloud 

 

The brand linked up with Service Cloud to provide their digital staff with all the resources necessary to create the same high-quality interactions with customers online as they did in the past. As a result, the staff was able to help customers considerably more quickly.

 

Thanks to Service Cloud, it became possible to have insights with customer order history and also set up automated workflows.

Marketing Cloud 

 

As we already saw in the first case of Guess, Marketing Cloud offered new ways to provide customers what they want via omni-channeling and personalization.

 

Brunello Cucinelli's online shop attracts consumers from all over the world (over 50 different countries), and the brand's signature gentle touch is preserved by having customers often reply to emails by addressing them directly to Brunello himself. 

 

Impact

 

With the help of Salesforce, Brunello Cucinelli was able to free up staff time to focus on developing capable connections with clients. They have effectively translated the store's warm, welcoming atmosphere and high-end shopping experience to the internet realm.

 

The Commerce Cloud, in conjunction with supplementary Salesforce services, enabled a fourfold increase in online sales.The brand's digital business continues to grow rapidly, conquering new international markets – while Brunello Cucinelli does not change his tradition of giving 20% of the proceeds to charity.

 

Boggi Milano

 

 

Challenge

 

Boggi Milano is one of the reputable Milan-based fashion houses that has helped to establish the "Made in Italy" badge as one that is more than proud of and stands for elegance and high quality. The challenges for the brand were no less tough as those described above.

 

140 outlets in more than 31 countries, the brand's unique heritage, its distinctive approach to clientele, very high quality standards, and an exceptional reputation. How not only to keep it all, but also enhance it and power up? 

 

Solution

 

Boggi Milano has launched a variety of efforts to improve omnichannel and personalization of services as part of a company-wide restructuring effort with a keen eye on the seamless customer journey.

 

This required robust digital infrastructure, and once again Salesforce came to the rescue, with the additional basic triad of services already familiar to us: Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. 

 

Commerce Cloud

 

The complete transition to Commerce Cloud has strengthened the bonds between the offline and online markets. "Offline" stores were actively digitizing, while "online" stores were fed data from "offline" stores via omni-channel services like click and collect, reserve in stores, and solutions like Endless Aisle. This allowed Boggi Milano to provide their customers with a seamless experience across all touchpoints.

 

Service Cloud

 

For both brick-and-mortar and online shops, Service Cloud has brought relief by providing a unified, all-seeing system.

 

Marketing Cloud

 

What promotional campaigns resonate with customers the most? What was the feedback? What post-sale needs do buyers have? In order to get a comprehensive picture of the reactions, behavior of customers, in the end, to better understand customers and unify and centralize all marketing functions, Boggi Milano added a Marketing Cloud to their arsenal.

 

Impact

 

By implementing Salesforce Services, Boggi Milano was able to blur the boundaries between online and offline dimensions and synchronize the work of internal and digital teams. This resulted in an impeccable shopping experience, regardless of whether the purchase was made in-person or online. 

 

As a result, the level of satisfaction felt by customers is currently at an all-time high.Boggy Milano was able to realize a year-over-year (YoY) increase in online sales of more than one hundred percent. 

 

Bottom line

 

Thus, having carefully studied all three cases, what conclusion can we come to?

 

Top fashion brands, highly reputable, all with their unique heritage, and very delicate attitude towards their customers on a global scale — they were looking for something comparable in this grandeur to make their leap to digital. And they choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud. But certainly not Commerce Cloud alone.

 

Through the analysis of these three cases, we've come to a critical realization: the whole range of Salesforce cloud services (Service, Marketing, Sales,etc) is what made this kind of streamlined, high-quality customer engagement feasible. This very precise personalized omnichannel customer experience wouldn't be possible without the synergy of multiple Salesforce services.

 

Haven’t we forgotten anything?

 

Indeed, in our haste, we’ve forgotten to mention a vital mediator – your trustworthy technical partner/agency that can make these kinds of aspirations a reality – someone who will implement, integrate, migrate, customize, and maintain.

 

By utilizing Commerce Cloud computing capabilities, AI-driven predictive analytics, extensively employing SFRA and PWA Kit, building unique LINK cartridges, and pivotal Salesforce apps for AppExchange, tech Salesforce partners like Grinteq are designing your ecommerce environment that will bring a new level of sophistication to the shopping experience.

 

Author: Pavel Ponomarenko is a technical writer for Grinteq, digital ecommerce agency providing full-cycle software development assistance for US brands.