The Clymb minds members, merchandise

Portland, Ore. – Specialty membership-based outdoor retailer The Clymb targets active consumers with an active, content-driven marketing strategy. The Clymb drives people to its e-commerce site with content such as photos of outdoor activities on social networks like Instagram.



Primarily operating as a closeout retailer of outdoor gear, apparel and packaged trips, The Clymb often runs flash sales. Deciding it was time to stop using an outside advertising agency and bring marketing efforts in-house, The Clymb sought a platform that could both manage the need to acquire and convert customers and the need to effectively bid on merchandise.



The Clymb selected technology from advertising management software provider InsideVault, based on a personal recommendation. Specific aspects of the InsideVault solution that appealed to The Clymb included the technology and bidding platform, as well as reporting and customer service capabilities.



“We were specifically trying to optimize paid search spend around member acquisition and shopper acquisition,” said Scott Hollingsworth, VP finance The Clymb, in an exclusive Chain Store Age interview. “We acquire email addresses before someone can make a purchase. Once we have an email it can be hours, days, or months before the person makes a purchase.”



Thus, The Clymb needed to capture people looking to make a purchase, as well as simply acquire consumer emails. Using InsideVault’s reporting and ability to integrate into an existing data warehouse, The Clymb was able to manage its ROI on ad spend within the tool itself. This included using InsideVault algorithms to determine keywords that improved Google search placement.

In addition, The Clymb is now able to track all the members it acquires in its data warehouse and their sources down to the campaign/keyword level, and determine and manage their customer lifetime value.



“As a primarily closeout business we need to be mindful of margins and the cost to acquire a customer, so we were looking for a highly dynamic bidding platform that could respond quickly to changes in customer behavior or inventory availability and optimize spend to keep costs down,” added Hollingsworth.



With InsideVault, The Clymb transitioned from once-a-day bid management to a real-time system that modifies bids as market conditions change. The marketing team has access to a real-time dashboard to manage bids minute by minute, taking current customer behavior into account.



“We continue to optimize to customer lifetime value and are working on optimizing payback periods across multiple channels and keyword campaigns,” concluded Hollingsworth.