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Josh Zelman, Senior Director, Customer Experience at the familiar high street bookstore chain Barnes & Noble took the virtual stage at Movable Ink’s recent (Re)Think conference to explain how the brand is leveraging technology to strike a critical balance between in-store, online, BOPIS and curbside pick-up experiences.
Starting in his position about a year ago, Zelman originally expected to take responsibility for email marketing and CRM. “In pretty short order, several other areas were consolidated under me,” he told us, “including social, membership and creative — for the overall company, not just for the social channel.”
BOPIS versus mail delivery
Barnes & Noble has long had an e-commerce website where books could be ordered for mail delivery as well as for pick-up in store. With the pandemic came a huge shift in customer behavior, Zelman said, away from brick and mortar to shopping online but retrieving in store. We asked why customers didn’t simply order mail delivery.
“At the onset of the pandemic, mail delivery was affected,” said Zelman. We augmented most of our service emails, which had typically just instructed customers that their order has been received or shipped, to essentially give ourselves breathing room with regard to delivery times. There was an increase in overall dot com traffic and order volume, and that had a ripple effect on our delivery ability. We had complications from distribution centers as well, trying to navigate new social distancing measures while simultaneously starting to see volumes that were nearing typical holiday-like
Read more here: https://marketingland.com/how-barnes-noble-is-coping-with-covid-282667