Bata x Maxis: Online and Offline Marketing Success

Shoe brand Bata is known for its wide network of retail storefronts but needed an effective promotional marketing strategy to boost sales to physical stores while also growing its online sales channels.

With the sheer number of retail outlets it has across the country, it is expected that Bata’s strongest revenue driver is its physical storefronts.

What the company wanted to do was to reduce spending on offline marketing but instead concentrate its marketing spend online to promote all three of its sales channels: retail stores, eCommerce website and online marketplaces.

It was necessary to find a way to still promote retail visits while growing the brand’s reach online as, currently, online channels contributed a very small portion of annual turnover.

Devising the right business strategies

Maxis eCommerce & Retail assisted Bata in devising a digital marketing strategy, providing expertise on media buys as well as advising eCommerce best practices applicable to both online and offline channels.

This resulted in successful online campaigns such as the Bata x Coca-Cola limited edition sneakers that delivered RM20,000 in revenue within six hours of its launch at midnight.

The digital marketing campaign included a pre-launch landing page as well as an email blast to spread the word about the collection without needing ad buy to promote it. In particular, using email to raise awareness and nurture customers proved to be crucial in driving a high return on ad spend for the campaign.

With a successful online business outreach strategy, the company was able to reach over 10 million people on social media platforms during key shopping periods, reaching more than 60% of Bata’s target audience.

This strategy also drove a 90% engagement rate during the Raya period which not only built brand awareness but helped push up footfall traffic.

More recently, the webstore did very well during the Movement Control Order (MCO) period. Bata offered free shipping throughout with no minimum spend on top of a 30% discount with their Stay Home Shop Safe campaign. The result was a staggering 460% increase in webstore revenue, a 430% higher conversion rate, and a 1900% return on ad spend.

Improving Bata's existing loyalty programme

Another goal was to improve Bata’s existing loyalty program, the Bata Club.

Previously, Bata Club members could only collect and redeem points at retail outlets and not on the Bata Malaysia website.

This hampered the overall scalability as well as the revenue potential of the Bata Malaysia website. New customers online would likely make their further purchases offline instead of on the website to collect points.

With the assistance of Maxis eCommerce & Retail, Bata’s existing retail POS system was successfully integrated with the Bata Malaysia webstore to make the Bata Club program available to both retail and online customers.

Customers were able to collect and redeem points online, and this led to a 35–40% growth in new customer acquisition on the webstore since its launch last July 2019 as well as a 15–20% uplift in online revenue ever since.

Bata’s success has proven that with the right digital approach, online marketing can produce results not just for eCommerce but also for physical retail outlets – delivering not only value and a seamless shopping experience but the kind of reach that is hard to attain with traditional offline marketing.