The Sum of the Parts, Part 5: Using the Data You Have

Welcome to the fifth in our series “The Sum of the Parts,” in which consultant Rob Galkoff discusses the elements critical to successful e-mail marketing. 


I’m not too sure what’s the harder job: collecting data or doing something meaningful with it. You may remember that in an earlier article I talked about a UK retail client of mine that has just started properly collecting customer data. After a couple of months they had more than 20,000 names. As a team, we’ve decided to contact those customers to thank them for joining our loyalty program and to offer them an amazing offer.

The aim of the promotion was twofold:

1)    to test the responsiveness of the database

2)    to drive people into stores, thus showing store staff the real benefit to their sales of collecting the data (not all the stores have been doing it very well).

The promotion was the strongest the retailer has ever offered: For every $100 spent the customer will receive a voucher to spend $50 on additional product there and then.

A huge debate ensued while we thought about the different options: How much of a voucher should we offer customers?  We knew that at 50% we would only just break even, and there was some concern that we were setting a dangerous precedence by offering such a good promotion. We eventually came to a consensus to run with the $50 promotion and to test a $30 voucher and a $40 voucher among two small segments. One of the driving factors for going with the higher promotion was that the database was only 20,000 names, so if we try this now and learn from it, any negative impact would be smaller than if we did it in six or 12 months’ time.

Having decided we needed to segment our data to do some testing, the next question was how would we communicate with our customers. “We’re going to e-mail them all” was the first answer. This was a good start, but what are we trying to do? The aim was to not only test the responsiveness of the database but also to drive people into stores. By using just e-mail, we’d be making a terrible assumption that our in-store customers are responsive to e-mail. (To add another challenge to the mix, I was also in the process of finding a new e-mail service provider, as the incumbents’ delivery rates were questionable).

We quickly decided to do the following:

1)    Send a personalized letter to arrive within 48 hours of the start of the promotion.

2)    On day 1 of the promotion (Thursday) each club member would receive an e-mail telling him about the exclusive promotion we were running to celebrate the launch of our loyalty club.

3)    Friday afternoon would see the second e-mail land, with the aim of reminding customers of the promotion and driving them in to stores on Saturday.

4)    As the promotion finished on Monday evening, customers would receive a final e-mail late Monday morning to let them know there were only a few hours left, driving them in-store during lunch and after work.

If we had the ability to text we’d have added this into the mix too. However, we opted not to put the promotion on Facebook or Twitter, as we wanted it to be an exclusive reward for our club members and not for general consumption.

Because we introduced the traditional mail response mechanism, there was also a need to collect data in-store. We would be able to use some online metrics such as e-mail open rates and click-throughs to the Website. But the in-store data would show us how much the customer has spent. The company’s e-commerce site was unable to handle this sort of promotion at this time—a new site will be launched in a few months—so this was an exclusive in-store.

The lessons here: Don’t restrict your communications to e-mail. Test different offers and different mechanisms and formats. It doesn’t matter how big or how small your database is, you can always split it so that you can get some learnings for the next time you run the campaign.

Next time we’ll be focusing on reactivation e-mails. If you have some examples, please feel free to share them with me at rob@thebusinessconsultants.co.uk. (This is a test to see how many people read to the end of the article and want to interact with me!)
 
Rob Galkoff is CEO of the Business Consultants. He was previously marketing director at multititle UK mailer Findel.