Sgt Grit Increases Sales with Cross-Channel Personalization

About

U.S. Marines are everything to Sgt Grit Marine Specialties (www.grunt.com), which began in 1988 with one t-shirt and a strong desire to help Marines. You'll find the Marine Corps spirit in all their USMC products, from basic Marine Corps t-shirts to custom unit items. It grew from being a home-based business to a 22,500 sq. ft. warehouse and showroom with everything a Marine can imagine. It has evolved into a place where Marines can come and meet other Marines, share tattoos and stories, keep up with Marine Corps news, or shop for USMC gear. Like they say at Sgt Grit, "If we don't have it, Chesty wouldn't want it!"

Problem: Expensive Manual Recommendation System

Sgt Grit has over 7,500 items available in their storefront. It used to take the purchasing department 40 hours a month to figure out which products to promote together. Creativity was required, and pairing was often done by searching on terms (i.e. Semper Fi) to find products that might be sold together. This “hunt-n-peck” system was labor intensive, cumbersome, inefficient and most importantly, produced some pretty random product recommendations.

Right Business, Wrong eCommerce Platform

In order to grow their business, Sgt Grit recognized their existing ecommerce system had some serious limitations, including requiring several consultants taking up to 6 months to implement enhancements. They needed a more flexible and economical ecommerce solution. Magento’s Enterprise ecommerce platform fit the bill and was soon deployed. It’s designed to be customized, enabling Sgt Grit’s own IT staff to easily modify Magento to meet their business needs.

Cross-Channel Integration is Key

Getting 4-Tell Boost® automated recommendations up and running on the ecommerce site was easy for Sgt Grit. The real challenge was the sales data. There are three sides to Sgt Grit’s business, the ecommerce site, the showroom and the call center. It was critical to have a recommendation system that could use sales information from all sources. It was a snap for Boost to use the combined sales data, enabling Sgt Grit to provide truly personalized product recommendations. And because the recommendations even work for anonymous shoppers, 4-Tell automatically improves the shopping experience for all Sgt Grit customers.

Effective Results

After implementing 4-Tell’s Recommendation Engine, the conversion of browsers to buyers more than quadrupled for those who clicked on recommendations. Automated recommendations increased overall product sales by 10%, and shoppers who clicked on recommendations on product pages had an average order value increase (AOV) of 18%. This was a significant improvement over their manual system and it was due to the combination of being able to use all the sales data to enable 4-Tell to provide dynamic and truly relevant recommendations.

Forward Ho

Because 4-Tell Boost® has proven so effective, Sgt Grit has plans to expand their use of recommendations throughout their website and in their transactional emails. Semper Fi!

“4-Tell’s automated recommendations have increased our conversion rate by 4x, resulting in an 18% AOV increase. It was easy to implement, improved our customers shopping experience and gives us a great ROI. We plan to expand its use throughout our business.”

Kerry Seley, IT Director, Sgt Grit

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