Retail Profiles
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ABJ winners get serious about the Internet
By Teresa Novellino
July 27, 2009
New York--When Day's Jewelers President Jeff Corey first launched the company's Web site more than a decade ago, it was mostly a marketing tool to entertain and inform customers.
Today, it's a serious part of the business--and it ought to be: Day's e-commerce sales tripled over the past year, with 80 percent of those sales generated by consumers outside of the chain's market, which spans six stores in Maine and New Hampshire.
It's enough to make Day's consider the Web site its seventh store.
"What we've tried to do with the Web site is to emulate the store experience, to make people feel welcome, comfortable, safe" said Corey, one of three panelists at an America's Best Jewelers (ABJ) educational seminar titled "Managing Your Web Presence," held on Sunday as the JA New York Summer Show opened in New York.
The panelists, each representing stores that won the 2009 America's Best Jewelers Couture division, seemed to agree: In recent years, it hasn't been enough for retail jewelers to simply have a Web presence. It has to be taken seriously, which means bringing in professionals instead of wrangling with Web coding on their own, plus looking at everything from security issues for e-commerce to responding promptly to customers who use blogs to publicly gripe about a bad in-store experience.
As jewelers have learned more about the Internet's intricacies, their Web sites have changed accordingly.
DaysJewelers.com has been reworked multiple times, says Corey. The latest redesign, completed in November 2007, yielded a secure e-commerce platform and allowed the jeweler to showcase more product via high-quality images (photographed by an in-house photographer) that users can zoom in on.
The site now has 8,000 featured items, with an additional 150 new items added each week. It also features practical information designed to set customers at ease as they navigate the site.
The jeweler has pointedly made the toll-free customer service phone number a fixture throughout the site and added customer service information such as the company's return and exchange policy.
"We made a list based on what customers want when they walk in the store," Corey said.
Still, as several jewelers in the audience noted, efforts to please the consumer do not always work, and a disgruntled customer can use the Internet to bad-mouth a business.
One key suggestion from Corey: Go to Google.com and set up a free "Google Alert" for your store name so that you automatically receive an e-mail if a story or blog that involved your company is posted on the Internet.
Then, should a customer write something negative about your store in a blog, for instance, you can contact them to resolve the issue. By doing so, the customer will often have a change of heart and write something positive about the store, Corey said.
That connection between the store itself and the customer is also important at Yanina and Co. in Cedar Grove, N.J., where consumers and advertisers are asked to weigh in on the company's Web site, said Maureen O'Keefe, the jeweler's marketing executive, and another ABJ panelist.
One of the store's greatest lessons, though, didn't come from users but from tech experts.
"Our biggest mistake was we had a Flash-based site," O'Keefe said. "It was beautiful, but [because of the coding], we didn't come up in search engines."
The jeweler has since eliminated Flash from its site and honed in on coverage it has received in the press, be it editorial in nature or an advertisement. Attracting the interest of time-crunched magazine editors who can easily navigate the site and find merchandise to feature or borrow for photo shoots has resulted in free publicity that wouldn't happen if the jeweler's Web site wasn't up to par, she said.
Mark Clodius, who co-owns Clodius and Co., in Rockford, Ill., with his wife, Monika, says the company's Web site has undergone multiple redesigns since 2001.
One of the favorite aspects of the current site is a slide show that allows the jewelers to show off their specialty: custom-designed jewelry. Plans are in the works to add YouTube videos spotlighting the process behind the custom design work.
The company has also paid for ad-word advertising on Google, which has helped drive up the number of impressions to the site.
And although the company does not yet offer e-commerce, it has benefited from referrals.
A custom ring created for one of the store's bridal customers caught the attention of an acquaintance, a Norwegian executive who asked if the store had a Web site. Luckily, it did. The overseas executive promptly found the site, and after a flurry of e-mailed exchanges including renditions of what a custom piece might look like, the man purchased a $20,000 engagement ring.
"Word-of-mouth was always the biggest thing for us," Clodius said.
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Small multi video player located on right rail of NJN site
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