How Michaels engages 150,000+ customers to build a digital community of makers
By: Quentin Lebeau
Tags: Ecommerce, Retail, Customer Experience, Customer Engagement, Community Engagement

Michaels is the biggest Arts & Crafts retailer in the US and one of its best-known department stores. On Michaels.com, customers can shop thousands of articles in Michaels’ huge catalogue.

Challenge

People who were used to getting advice from Michaels in-store employees on their DIY project, didn’t find that same experience on the brand’s online shop.

Customers were not finding what they were looking for and leaving the website confused.

The challenge for Steve Carlotti, EVP of Marketing at The Michaels Companies, and his team was to reproduce the excellent in-shop experience they had created over the years on their online store.

Why TokyWoky?

Steve and his team turned to TokyWoky, as he wanted to control his customer support costs and offer a more human approach than a chatbot alone could offer.

Beyond these short-term objectives, they also wanted to harness the enthusiasm of the millions of visitors on michaels.com every month, as well as their huge community on social media (the brand has over 1.2 million followers on Instragram and 3 million Facebook fans), to build a community of engaged Michaels customers on their own website.

This is in line with the company’s ambition to build and foster communities of Makers everywhere. DIY being as much a passion-centred retail industry as fashion or beauty, they knew they had great community potential.

Which they then want to leverage to build a wholly unique customer experience, everywhere you can encounter the Michaels brand.

Solution: Building a helpful online community

Michaels went live with TokyWoky’s community chat and platform on their website early 2018.

Customers started helping each other immediately and shoppers were asking questions about their latest DIY project. Very quickly, this allowed Steve’s team and the Community Experts at TokyWoky to identify the brand’s most engaged customers.

Today, these more experienced Makers now answer other shoppers’ questions and create meaningful content, allowing Michaels to build a helpful customer community in just a few months time.

Every month, more than 10,000 customers now receive advice they can trust from people just like them.

“As the leader in arts and crafts, we are leveraging our size and scale to build stronger digital communities for makers of all experience levels. Through our successful TokyWoky partnership, we have created strong customer engagement by connecting makers to other more experienced makers on michaels.com to answer questions, provide inspiration and make creativity happen.” — @Steve Carlotti, EVP Marketing, The Michaels Companies

Results

In just twelve months, Steve and the Michaels team have:

🔹 Engaged over 150,000 customers

🔹 Advised 10,000+ customers per month thanks to passionate Michaels customers

🔹 Increased conversion of the Michaels Digital Makers community by 400%

🔹 Generated 100,000s of conversations between customers

🔹 Harnessed 100,000s of data points and insights, identifying conversion-blockers and customer journey improvements on their website

*Numbers are from January 2019. We’ll be back in 2020 for an update.