Madison Reed Deepens Customer Engagement with Interactive Color Bar Experience
Madison Reed has debuted a new interactive digital swatch panel experience to help its customers explore the brand's hair color products to find their perfect shade.
Madison Reed tapped OnQ to develop the new experience and launched it at its Color Bar in Manhattan, with more recent roll-outs at key locations in Miami, Chicago and Boston. Deployment of the new digital swatch panel experience led to significantly increased engagement in all four locations. Thousands of unique interactions were captured in just the first several weeks of deployment, with each customer engagement averaging more than three minutes per visit. The experience – which features a 46-inch touchscreen by Elo integrated with OnQ’s Converge digital engagement platform – has quickly become a valued supplement to Madison Reed’s on-site color specialists, able to provide a self-assisted product education journey for customers to select their perfect shade.
“Helping someone discover their perfect shade is the most important interaction we have with our customers. Enhancing the process with the digital swatch panel introduces a certain air of playfulness that makes the whole experience much more approachable and fun,” said Andrew Lande-Shannon, Madison Reed’s senior director of store experience. “Offering a consultation process that’s driven by a digital tool not only shows that Madison Reed is a digitally minded company, but it also supports our omnichannel strategy to deliver a consistently rewarding experience both online and in store.”
Madison Reed chose to pilot the digital swatch panel experience in two of its full-service Color Bars, and two of its retail-only locations. Deploying in this mixed environment enabled the company to gain valuable insight about customer engagement habits at each location type. For example, customers in Madison Reed’s retail-only locations researched an average of 2.86 products, while Color Bar customers researched an average of 1.79 products.
Similarly, customers at the retail-only locations were more likely to view instructional videos than customers at the Color Bar locations. This data suggests that Madison Reed’s retail-only locations attract a broader customer base, many of whom are not yet familiar with the company’s products. This customer engagement data will prove invaluable as Madison Reed continues to refine the way it presents its products to customers within its different store formats.
With more than four dozen shades to choose from, Madison Reed wanted to create an intuitive experience for customers to easily narrow their choices, filtering by the customer’s desired hair color, level of gray coverage and color intensity. By simply tapping their way through this series of questions, customers arrive at their perfect color, and then have the option to “text me this shade.” By simply entering their mobile number or scanning a QR code, full details about their chosen shade is sent to their phone so they can take the experience home with them, get advice from others and then complete their purchase. Of the 1,500-plus customers who visited the display during the testing period, nearly 12% of them sent the experience to their phone to continue at a later time.
Customers also have the option of taking the Madison Reed color quiz by entering their mobile number or scanning a QR code. This series of 12 questions about the customer’s hair type and desired results is one of the most popular tools on the Madison Reed website, and the company wanted to bring the experience in-store. Sending the quiz to the customer’s phone brings yet another interactive element into the store, with the added convenience and privacy of delivering the experience on the customer’s phone.
Lastly, the digital swatch panel experience also includes a library of informative videos that can either be viewed on the display, or sent directly to the customer’s phone for later viewing. Video content includes tutorials about home hair coloring, as well company history, to create a deeper connection between customers and the Madison Reed brand.
And while the new digital swatch panel experience delivers the customer journey improvements OnQ was tasked with creating, Madison Reed now has access to data that paints a detailed picture of the customer journey. Every point of interaction with the new digital swatch panels is captured by OnQ’s Converge digital engagement platform, giving insight into how and when customers engage with the screen.
Madison Reed personnel have access to a detailed dashboard that gives aggregate and average data for the number of product visits, interactions, session duration and video plays. Additionally, OnQ logs every time a customer sends content to their phone, painting a clear picture of which content is most interesting and useful to customers.