Personalization Audit: DTLR

Unlike many brands we've looked at in our Personalization Audit series, today's feature brand - DTLR - has a pretty solid offline presence, with over 245 brick & mortar locations in 19 states. Does this mean that DTLR will translate their in-store customer service to a more personalized online experience? Keep reading to find out.

DTLR personalization strategy audit

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There are a number of multi-brand streetwear retailers that call Shopify their virtual home, but DTLR has got to be one of the biggest. With hundreds of brick and mortar locations and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, DTLR is one of the go-to resources to shop top brands like Jordan, Nike, and adidas. But DTLR carries plenty of interesting smaller brands as well, and offers up men's, women's, and kids' collections to serve a pretty diverse audience overall.

There's a few interesting things about DTLR compared to some of the other brands we've audited so far in our series. First of all, DTLR is pretty clear about the fact they carry different brands - sites like ModCloth and Princess Polly also stock other brands, but in a much less direct way. This means there's a potential to tailor the site based on a customer's preferred brands.

Beyond that of course, there's considerations around which collections a shopper favors (i.e. men vs. women) and what activities they seem to be buying clothing for (i.e. leisure vs. athletic wear).

Finally, DTLR should be aiming to get customers to build bigger orders by highlighting items that are simply designed to go together - the same color, print, or cut are all easy strategies we'd expect to see on their site.

What DTLR got right

• Free shipping incentive cross-sells: One of our favorite strategies to boost AOV is to promote items that will help a customer reach a store's minimum shipping threshold. DTLR does this successfully in the cart, although only on the cart page itself, and not their slideout Ajax cart. The featured products don't feel incredibly expensive, making it feel like not too much of a stretch to add more items to cart. DTLR could work on ensuring the cart cross-sells are more relevant to the product added to cart (i.e. showing women's accessories when the items are from their women's collections, or highlighting matching sets). Once a shopper hits the minimum shipping threshold, this section refreshes to 'complete the look', although it's worth noting the products do not seem to refresh.

Areas for DTLR to enhance

• Product detail page (PDP) recommendations: On the one hand, DTLR has a clear section dedicated to related products for every item on their site. On the other hand, the items in that section aren't always the most relevant. For example, browsing a sports bra that is clearly styled with a matching short brought up a single related product: A sports bra in a different print, by the same brand. On some pages, zero related products showed up at all, while on others, products from irrelevant categories appeared (like youth boy or men's boxers on a women's shorts page). DTLR could improve the shopper experience by curating bundles or fine tuning their recommendations algorithm to style 'looks' as opposed to items that are simply from the same brand.

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Missed personalization opportunities for

DTLR

• Full site customization: Like a number of other brands we've audited, DTLR caters to men, women, and kids. One unique difference is unlike most of the other brands we've featured, their primary target demographic appears to be men, based on the hierarchy of the home page and navigation. If a shopper showed a preference toward a specific product category, the entire site could be rearranged, including the navigation order, home page order, and the hero image.
• Recent views: The DTLR site features well over 1,000 products. They could definitely benefit from adding recent views throughout the site to give customers an easy way back to products they've already viewed and possibly liked.
• Collections: There is no customization in how DTLR's collections are sorted, when it feels like it could be an easy use case for DTLR. For example, a customer that primarily browses the Nike collection of their site should have Nike items sorted toward the top of their 'What's New' collection under Men.

Conclusion

For a brand of DTLR's size, it's surprising how much low-hanging fruit exists within their personalization strategy. There are some really easy tactics the brand could implement almost instantly that would create a smoother shopping experience and ideally drive more conversions for the brand.

But more importantly, DTLR has a huge opportunity. They know their customers have preferences - otherwise why would they feature brands like Nike and adidas as their own navigation items? Tapping into these brand preferences could open up a whole world of personalization potential, including re-ordering the site navigation, changing the home page promotions, and even changing what customer segments receive what emails.

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