Today, our guest is Julie Acosta, Director of eComm and Marketing Analytics at NOBULL, a fast-growing Boston-based footwear and apparel brand.

For Julie, curiosity has a funny way of making you change course. As she originally set out to avoid numbers by going to university for marketing, but as she began developing her career, she found that understanding and working with data made her more effective at understanding her customer base.

It was at AutoZone, where her path really changed, as Julie went from merchandising to building AutoZone’s first eCommerce Analytics team from the ground up.

By bridging the digital and in-store experiences, her team altered the company’s understanding of how the two were linked, including how new product lines can grow existing lines and how online customer behavior influences in-store purchases.

Other key takeaways:

How to balance data with usability and how analytics can’t always tell you everything
- “I have always had really smart people on my team, like data scientists that were just phenomenal at modeling and just doing some more advanced analytics. That team would be more focused on transactions and the other half of my team was more focused on behavior. And that was leveraging things like Adobe Analytics to go and understand what's going on from a customer journey standpoint. And so there was a lot of reading between the lines and mix of like art and science.” *** How B&M and e-commerce are inextricably linked and by synchronizing the two you can create a cohesive customer journey strategy**
- “Online was supplemental to our overall business; our true core business was brick and mortar. AutoZone has been very successful at that. Online is, a crucial part because you can't ignore it, but also knowing that from a conversion standpoint, we know a lot of customers are going online and then they're buying in-store.”
- “You need to cut through all the bullsh*t to get them to their end goal. And the only way to do that is going back to that consumer behavior, really understanding what was their intent of their journey. Do you really understand that as an owner of the website, whether you're a product owner, analytics, or a a merchant, do you understand why your customer is engaging with that product or engaging with that part of your site? If you do, great, make sure you've got a good vision on how to make it the best experience possible.”
How to solve perceived customer cannibalization
- “At the end of the day, what it did show is that there really wasn't cannibalization happening. We were able to show through the numbers, through this additional offering, something that nobody thought something as simple as a lead time would draw up that much business. And it was significant.”

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-acosta-89846b11/
Spotlight interview: https://shorturl.at/Md6SR

Chapters

00:00 Intro
01:28 From merchandising to marketing analytics
05:30 Building AutoZone’s e-commerce and analytics team
09:08 Balancing data and leadership
11:30 Understanding customer behavior through data
21:38 Bridging the online and offline customer experience
24:57 Leveraging new product lines to sell legacy products
35:35 Transition to NOBULL
40:35 Outro

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Special Guest: Julie Acosta.

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