It’s no joke that women love shoes. And at Nine West Group Inc., which
has been using personalized e-mails from YesMail Inc. to target customers who
shop online and at its 700 retail stores, the company can say that its customers
also love shoe offers. As many as 70% of responses to its e-mail offers take
place in the offline stores, says Dianne Binford, director of consumer direct
at Nine West. Retailers who focus only on web site responses to e-mails are
missing out on a key impact measurement, she says.
The women’s shoe and accessory designer, manufacturer and retailer started
working with Chicago-based YesMail in October 2000 to develop a cost-effective
way to communicate with its growing database of customers. Together they created
a customized monthly newsletter that is personalized for each recipient based
on information relevant to her shopping habits, such as shoe size, width and
style as well as shopping history.
Ed Henrich, vice president of client services at YesMail, says the e-mails
also rely on other key elements to determine the type of personalized offer,
such as where the most recent purchase was made, regional offers and events
and reminders of loyalty benefits. Nine West tracks such information through
its POS system and provides it to YesMail for customizing the newsletters.
Even though the majority of response has come in the form of store sales, the
personalization effort has become the top driver of traffic and conversion at
Nine West’s web site. Personalized e-mails generate click-through responses
of 20-30%. Nine West also experiences a 20-40% increase in sales within seven
days following an e-mail campaign.
Going forward, Binford says Nine West plans to work on collecting more e-mail
addresses from customers at its stores by encouraging clerks to ask customers
for their e-mail addresses and to explain the benefits of receiving the e-mails.
Nine West has taken the smartest approach to e-mail marketing—putting
together a list based on personalized information and consumer permission, says
David Hallerman, senior analyst at New York-based researchers e-Marketer Inc.
“Campaigns like that are bound to have high response rates,” he says.
Binford also points out that e-mail allows Nine West to communicate more often
with its customers than does direct mail. Nine West says it costs only pennies
to send each e-mail, a fraction of the cost of sending a direct mail piece.
Binford says the low cost of e-mail allows Nine West to send communications
to customers 12 times a year instead of the four it previously could afford.
