The Athlete's Foot conversion rate soars 26% in 3 months with Bazaarvoice

Across the globe, athletic footwear retailer The Athlete’s Foot is known for selling high-quality shoes and apparel from brands like Asics, Hoka, Brooks, Saucony, Mizuno, and their own brand line. In 1976, the store began operating in Australia and quickly grew in size and reach. Today, they’re active in more than 130 retail stores across Australia and New Zealand.

Along with its retail success, the brand wanted to expand its digital footprint and connect with online customers through the power of user-generated content (UGC) — content created by an individual rather than a brand — to streamline, inform, and enhance the shopping experience.
To do this, The Athlete’s Foot turned to Bazaarvoice to increase online ratings and reviews, as well as syndicate those reviews to other major retailers.

“We want to keep the visitors on our website and make sure they find all the answers they need straight on the website without having to go somewhere else,” said Head of e-commerce and CRM Archie Pihier. “Not only to give them trust in the quality of the products but also to make sure they get the product they actually need based on their usage. The Athlete’s Foot is all about providing the right FIT; Providing qualitative product reviews contributes to that, especially for a customer not able to visit a physical store.”

By implementing Bazaarvoice Ratings and Reviews, as well as Syndication, The Athlete’s Foot was able to increase its online presence by collecting 8,000 reviews in one year and boost conversion rates by 26% in the first three months of rolling out its UGC program.

Review request emails and syndication increase review volume to over one million

Shoppers like to see ratings and reviews when they’re considering a purchase (aka social proof). In fact, those who interact with UGC are two times more likely to buy. But it’s not always easy to obtain these valuable bits of content, and The Athlete’s Foot realized they needed some help getting their reviews built up online. “The review system we were using before Bazaarvoice, had far too many limitations and didn’t offer syndication,” Pihier said.

So, The Athlete’s Foot began sending out review request emails and the multi-product submission form, where they could collect feedback on everything a shopper bought in one form, to build reviews. Syndication was also important to them since they were almost starting from scratch, and the brand was able to syndicate its reviews across the Bazaarvoice Network of 2,000 online retailers.

“Knowing that we started with a small number of reviews, it was really important to have a solution providing strong syndication capabilities. And I think there was a big win for us because we could start with a huge quantity of reviews,” Pihier said.

The Athlete’s Foot went live with Bazaarvoice in May 2021. Since then, they went from few online reviews to syndicating more than one million reviews available on their site.

“We collected a large amount of reviews,” Pihier said. “We’re very happy about it and especially so because we got a score of 4.3 out of 5, which was great for us. That’s why we do it. To get this confirmation from the user themselves — it’s a great satisfaction. It also comes with some feedback, and we can already see a lot of things we can improve.”

They’ve found the reviews useful in many ways, but they seem to be especially beneficial for The Athlete’s Foot in-house school shoe brand, Alpha, which previously had no reviews on The Athlete’s Foot website. In January 2023, the company ran a back-to-school campaign highlighting Alpha and early indicators are positive.

“It’s still a bit early to say, but we didn’t have [reviews] during the last back-to-school in January 2022. We have them this year and it seems pretty promising in terms of how people react to those reviews online and in-store,” Pihier said.

User-generated content boosts conversion rates by 26%

After The Athlete’s Foot implemented Ratings & Reviews and Syndication, the overall conversion rate jumped. In fact, during the first three months of using Bazaarvoice, The Athlete’s Foot saw conversion rates increase by 26%.

The Athlete’s Foot has also found a lot of value in the Bazaarvoice dashboard. They’ve used the reporting capabilities to keep a finger on the pulse of customer feedback and product issues — meaning, if they get more than one negative review, they’re able to go through the backend and look for similar reviews.

“You can start digging and take action if needed. It’s very easy to use,” Pihier said. “It’s very helpful for the team here.”

For example, The Athlete’s Foot team can pinpoint any issues with a product and share that feedback with the product team. There’s also the ability to respond to customer reviews to give them assurance that The Athlete’s Foot team will address any problems. Since 89% of customers say they’re likely to shop with a business that replies to customer reviews, that’s a powerful feature for the brand to leverage, especially when it comes to building authenticity.

Bazaarvoice’s solutions provide a well-rounded shopping experience

The Athlete’s Foot has seen great success with Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews + Syndication — so what’s next for the athletic footwear retailer?

“We’re just starting to scratch the surface with reviews, but we’re really keen on exploring more things like Questions & Answers or anything linked to visual content, social commerce, and so on,” Pihier said.

With the valuable information and insights The Athlete’s Foot gets from using Bazaarvoice, it’s clear that they’ll continue running on new trails for quite some time.

To find out how you too can increase review volume and boost conversions,  request a demo here.