How To Avoid Pre-Order Disasters with Sylvain Nigra

Summary

Our special guest, Sylvain Nigra, brings decades of experience at some of the most successful brands in the world to talk about how pre-orders ought to work to create excitement and reward loyal customers for their fidelity to your brand. Are pre-orders right for all retailers? What happens when they go south? What is the best way to measure the success of pre-order initiatives?

We ask these questions and more of our special guest, Sylvain Nigra, founder and co-CEO of Retail Performance 360 and former retail director for top luxury brands including Prada, Ralph Lauren, and Michael Kors. Sylvain brings decades of experience at some of the most successful brands in the world to talk about how pre-orders ought to work to create excitement and reward loyal customers for their fidelity to your brand. He’s seen firsthand that it’s better to stay away from pre-orders altogether than roll out a poorly executed program. He brings his decades of experience to the table to discuss the technology and processes needed to make pre-orders work.

Conversation Rundown

[ 1:39-3:41 ] Benefits of pre-order
Sylvain says pre-orders are a great way to engage loyal customers. Giving them an opportunity to purchase something before anyone else, or perhaps even influence production, is special. But it can also be used as a marketing tool to attract new customers. It's always interesting to talk to different people about their perspectives on pre-orders. The inventory management perspective can also bhi focussed on.

[ 5:59-6:51 ] The logistics of pre-orders
Sylvain Nigra is absolutely right: if your pre-order process isn't seamless, it's counter-productive. There's nothing worse than building excitement through pre-orders only to disappoint through lack of communication or due to delays. Everyone talks about the importance of a seamless experience in shopping. We talk about it in this abstract way - but it all comes down to technology. It comes down to having the right order management system in place to get everyone on the same page.

[ 14:48-15:42 ] How retailers can manage pre-orders
Your distributed order management system needs to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. Most technology providers sell you in the best-case scenario. On-time deliveries, happy customers. But there are so many exceptions when it comes to pre-orders. Something almost always goes wrong. So unless you have a system prepared to tackle those challenges, you're going to disappoint your customers.

[ 19:50-22:35 ] Major actors in pre-order project success
Pre-orders are an omnichannel effort. Everyone is involved, and everyone needs to be bought in for the project to be a success. I have myself been on the receiving end of a terrible pre-order experience. Delays communicated at the last minute, store teams that had no idea what was going on etc. Sylvain Nigra shares his perspective on the people and departments that need to be involved in a successful rollout.

[ 28:28-30:48 ] How to measure pre-order success
Retailers always struggle with measuring the success of omnichannel projects. Anil Patel and Sylvain Nigra talk about KPIs for pre-orders- How do you know if it was a success? How do you combine hard metrics with qualitative feedback? Sylvain highly recommends getting direct, anecdotal feedback from customers. Even if the project was a tremendous success from a profitability standpoint, was it an exciting, seamless, and pleasurable experience?

Retail Tips & Tweetables

Pre-order encourages the loyal customer to be even more loyal to the brand and for those who are not so close to the brand, it can also develop attract new customers to the brand because of the newness.

Pre-orders can not be for everything, think of the investment in terms of communication, in terms of product design, and about the launch in different channels.

If you want to make pre-order excessive success, then your store team needs to be your ambassadors, they need to believe in it and they'll need also to be reinsured.

When it comes to having a high quality and special product launch pre-order becomes a very good tool to get people engaged to get them started early.

It's important that we track pre-order performance, how many orders were delivered on the promised date, because if you can't keep our promises to customers then don't expect loyalty from customers.