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It’s a simple selling strategy that retailer FootSmart has used on its e-commerce site and this year has extended to its e-mail marketing campaigns, and with great success, the company reports. It expects to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in 2009 by leveraging product recommendations in e-mails.
“We project FootSmart will generate an additional $750,000 this year from our transactional e-mail program by delivering relevant cross-sell and upsell messages in our e-mail,” says Shera Shrago, senior manager of interactive marketing at FootSmart.com.
FootSmart, operated by BenchMark Brands Inc., No. 175 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, sells more than 3,000 comfort, health and pain-relieving products through its site and catalog. It uses e-mail marketing technology from StrongMail Systems Inc. and product recommendations technology from Coremetrics.
FootSmart’s previous platform for delivering e-mail offered limited integration capabilities, which affected its ability to increase the relevancy of its program, the merchant says. StrongMail’s solution enables direct integration with FootSmart’s customer database, web analytics and product recommendations systems, as well as a ratings and reviews system from Bazaarvoice Inc.
“When we switched to StrongMail and subsequently improved the relevancy of our cart abandonment program, we were able to increase the amount of revenue generated per each e-mail from $1.95 to $4.00,” Shrago says.
In addition to cross-selling and upselling, FootSmart is using e-mail to boost the number of product reviews on its site. Through the integration of the e-mail marketing and customer reviews systems, FootSmart is able to seamlessly use e-mail to encourage customers to post online reviews at a pre-determined time after a purchase.
“Using StrongMail to automatically trigger an e-mail after a purchase is the primary driver of reviews on our site,” Shrago says. “By using Bazaarvoice and StrongMail together, we have seen a significant improvement in engagement.”
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