Master class in digital marketing with Crocs

Obviously when it hit, the first impact was to our retail stores and we essentially shut down our entire retail store base in North America and Europe. Our focus was on our employees and ensuring that we were doing the right thing for our retail and corporate employees around the world. Then as an organisation we quickly shifted to what could we do to help and what we had at our disposal to help make an impact in our community.

Ensuring that we were providing our teams the level of support that they needed, we leveraged Microsoft Teams probably more heavily than we ever had in the past to stay connected and collaborate. We were able to address questions on people's minds — everything from what was going on, working from home and what the company was doing to protect employees. It was really an invaluable asset for us during that time and has continued to be.

With stores closed, the only way to really interact with Crocs as a consumer was digitally through our websites around the world and some of our retail partners. Consumers shifted to Crocs.com, and many of those consumers hadn't shopped online with us before. We already had a strong digital presence, but it certainly accelerated that shift dramatically during Q2. Our team became focused on e-commerce operations, engaging consumers and fulfilling their orders.

It started as individual employees were getting requests from their friends who were nurses and doctors. As that was happening, we were also having conversations at a leadership level, asking ourselves how do we give back to that community, and how do we engage with that community in a meaningful way?

Health care workers have been part of our consumer base for years. And we thought the best way to give back was again to give them the footwear they needed on the front lines. Especially as our products are easy to clean and easy to get on and off, it just made so much sense. There was a need that we could uniquely fulfill and the best way for us to impact as many people as possible was through digital and leveraging our website so we could interact directly with the consumers. Rather than trying to do it through bulk donations at hospitals, it was the quickest path to market and allowed us to really get something stood up very quickly and start getting shoes out to the people in need.

Yeah, it was. It was probably one of the fastest turnarounds we've had for really, any project, especially of that magnitude. I think a key for that was Microsoft Teams. We went from concept to designing, building, and deploying that programme in really a matter of days.

Nobody was in the office at this time, so without Microsoft Teams, we probably wouldn't have been able to do it. We were able to get through the design phase very quickly and then handed over to our development team. There was a large group of people that had to understand what was happening, and so leveraging Teams to communicate and share information with a broader group was critical. That way our digital marketing team knew what was happening right when it was launching, and what their role was.

Yeah, it's a combination of sources. We really used almost every digital channel we had at our disposal, from email to search to social, and engaged with the health care community.

Yeah, you know, it really was. We gave away 10,000-20,000 pairs of shoes a day, for a total of just over 860,000 over the course of the campaign. We probably had 10 to 20 times that in demand from people coming to the site looking for a free pair of shoes.

Our team had to basically run a daily event. When we turned it on, that day’s allotment of shoes would go away in less than an hour and sometimes within minutes. So, we spent quite a bit of time collaborating on how to create that experience to ensure we could manage the traffic increases to our site but also manage expectations and communications with that group.

We've been very digitally focused for several years, so I think it was more of an acceleration of certain investments we already made. But we definitely saw a huge shift in our digital business, with rates in traffic increases we had never seen before coming in a very relatively short period of time.

We also did things with pricing, promotions, and a lot of targeted advertising to reach that community and to engage with them, probably more so than we had in the past.

Yeah, I think it's one of our most important digital advertising channels. Customer acquisition is, like for many brands, a huge part of our current and go-forward strategy and paid search allows us to target and grow our customer acquisition efforts, probably more than any other channel. And we look at it from a targeted standpoint. Everything from the health care workers, but also clogs, sandals our Jibbitz and personalisation business.

We leverage paid search to find more consumers, and that has been one of our highest-performing channels from an ROI standpoint. Paid search is one of our highest-performing channels globally.

The return we saw through Microsoft Advertising accelerated during this time. When we saw the increase in return, it really gave our team the confidence to invest more budget. And we were seeing that return in a relatively short amount of time, which not only helps us with an immediate benefit in the quarter, but also, we believe is bringing consumers into the brand.

We're also looking at the lifetime value of those consumers and the future value we expect. And so, I think with the Microsoft Advertising platform, we're also seeing a longer lifetime value with those consumers that will stay with this brand. So again, it becomes a very profitable channel for us, not just in the short term, but also in the long term.

I do think display plays a pretty big role, probably more so as a top of funnel activity in terms of how we're prospecting and building it from a customer acquisition standpoint. It plays a critical role in that consumer journey and getting people to engage with us, and then we may target them again through paid search through email or through different channels. But I think from a top of funnel perspective, display is an important channel as we think about overall customer acquisition.

It depends on the collaboration. For example, a collaboration with Post Malone is unique. Post Malone was a fan of Crocs before we launched a collaboration. It was an authentic connection, and he brings an authentic audience, right? What we want to do is try to find the overlap between his audience and his passionate fans and ours, because not everybody who loves Post Malone also wants a pair of Post Malone Crocs.

We have kind of the pre-launch time frame where we're doing things in paid search and trying to target Post Malone fans to make them aware of this collaboration and encourage them to come to the site to sign up for email to be notified of what's going to happen. We're building a daily database of the people that we know engage both with, say, Post Malone but also with Crocs.

When we launch a collaboration, those products sell out in 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes and so again, those are events. We use Teams for those events where we have — sort of like Ticketmaster — an online queue that people get in and we let people into the queue to buy the shoes and when they're gone, they're gone. But we're using Teams to monitor that queue in real time.

We recently did a collaboration with Chinatown Market and the Grateful Dead. It sold out within probably 30 minutes to an hour and I know there's a mix of Grateful Dead passionate fans and a mix of Crocs fans, and each time we do a collaboration we see that momentum build within our consumer base.

So, it's great from a PR standpoint, but also from a customer acquisition perspective, both in the short and long term. I think it's bringing in an entirely new, consumer-based touch that was not shopping with us before. That would be hard for us to target without that collaboration.

In general, you know Jibbitz are really our vehicle around personalisation and allowing consumers to take our classic clog and personalise it with the things that resonate with them. I think our brand offers a personalisation vehicle that is really unlike any other brand, allowing people to express themselves and truly come as they are. I think we'll continue to develop Jibbitz that are a reflection of the interests of our consumers and how they want to personalise and express themselves from a cultural and social perspective in our country.

It’s not just about what happened in that second quarter, but now that retail is broadly open, it's more about how that shifting consumer behaviour going to play out over the next three six, 12 months and even years from now.

Again, we saw a huge acceleration in our business. We saw huge increases in traffic to our site, both from an organic standpoint, but also from a paid search and social standpoint. I think we’ve seen some of that acceleration slow now that retail stores are back open, but the growth is still unbelievably strong.

Yes, I'd say we have been fortunate in that I think our product became even more relevant during this time, with people working from home. The more casual footwear, easy on, easy off, is even more relevant to our consumers now. So yes, Q2 certainly exceeded our expectations, and I think the real challenge now for us is how do we build on that?

Yeah, you know, we certainly would like to think so. Our Free Pair for Healthcare programme wasn’t about commercial success. It truly was, how can we help? And realising that we've had a loyal base of consumers for years that we've engaged with that have engaged with us, and there's a chance for us to show our gratitude to them, just made sense.

I don't think we knew we would get such a good response. It's kind of humbling when you think about the impact a simple pair of shoes can have.

I'd say it was exceedingly positive. I mean, it was everything from just simple thank-yous to really heartfelt acknowledgements of the impact we were having. I'm really proud of our leadership team and our brand for acting as quickly as we did. Our employee base was really proud of that as well.