Beyond The Rack - Case Study

A customer success story

Richard Cohene, VP Marketing, Beyond the Rack

No retail executive lives and breathes mobile like Richard Cohene, VP of Marketing at Beyond the Rack.

“Mobile is beyond a pillar [of our business] – 50% of the sales for our company happens on a mobile device between Monday to Friday, and on the weekend, we’ve seen it as high as 60%. And I’m certain that it’s going to continue dominating as the primary place where people are going to shop from Beyond the Rack.”
“I didn’t want to be behind the wave on mobile. Or on top of the wave. I wanted to be out in front.”
As the VP of Marketing at a high-volume flash sales retailer, it’s Richard’s job to ensure that Beyond the Rack is upholding the company’s core values by creating “a place where consumers and brands can meet to create a great opportunity for both.” And for Richard, the most important meeting place that customers can connect with the brand is on mobile devices – through the web, apps, and messaging.

Richard has always shied away from building mobile internally. While Beyond the Rack has an extremely strong development team, mobile technologies, platforms, and devices are moving so quickly that it’s difficult for the business to remain agile and flexible to the rapid changes.

“I didn’t want to be behind the wave on mobile. Or on top of the wave. I wanted to be out in front. I wanted to lead the mobile marketing wave of technology and products so that when customers come and visit Beyond the Rack, they really do feel like they’re getting a world-class experience and that they are immersed in smoothness and speed and ease of transaction that makes them want to come back and shop with us again.”

Starting With The Web

In 2011, Richard saw a growing percentage of Beyond the Rack’s web traffic coming from mobile devices, but he knew mobile wasn’t giving customers a good experience and therefore wasn’t converting well.

Richard understood that the best way to move forward was by providing a mobile-optimized experience for customers on the web, one that also let Beyond the Rack make frequent updates to their website without mobile falling out of sync. To fix the mobile web experience, Richard selected Mobify; “I knew that what [Mobify] was doing for other companies was world class”.

In Search Of Seamless Native Apps

In 2014, Richard worked with an app vendor to develop an iOS app for Beyond the Rack. “User experience is the number one most important reason why you should build an app”, Richard says, but found that the app experience delivered by the vendor was sluggish, and maintaining the app was both expensive and a management headache.

In 2015, when Mobify brought its app offering to market, Richard was quick to jump on the opportunity to extend the successful partnership, bringing both an Android app and iOS app to market quickly and efficiently through Mobify’s platform.

The attention to detail that Mobify’s trained mobile UX staff bring to the table is years of experience that you can’t buy. You just can’t find it elsewhere.”

Cutting Through The Mobile Marketing Noise

In 2015, Google announced support for web push notifications in the mobile version of Chrome, and Richard – leading from the front – knew that this, among other forms of mobile messaging, was going to be a powerful new way to bypass a customer’s crowded inbox and cut through the noise.

Richard teamed up with Mobify and signed up Beyond the Rack to pilot an innovative web-based messaging program that is already driving significant results and helping Beyond the Rack to deliver timely and relevant offers to their customers.

Permission

Notification

Engagement

Using A Single Platform For Every Mobile Shopping Touchpoint

Using Mobify to power all their mobile experiences has resulted in unprecedented mobile development and business agility for Richard and Beyond the Rack. “We’ve never been able to move faster as an organization than we have at this moment,” he says.
“We’ve never been able to move faster as an organization than we have at this moment.”
Richard also values the mobile shopping expertise that Mobify brings to the table: “While the Mobify staff may work for Mobify, they know our business just as well as we do, and they think about that when they come up with ideas or when we’re going through any type of change management. They recognize our sense of urgency.”