Web analytics and e-mail cultivate sales for Scotts
Lawns and the Internet don’t seem to go together, but The Scotts Co. has figured out a way to use its web site to talk to homeowners: It invites them to come to the site to sign up for e-mail newsletters, then uses a combination of web-based technology to deduce their interests and locations, and uses the newsletters to provide information and education.
The newsletters are low-key and non-promotional, but are effective in boosting sales. “People who subscribe to one or more e-mail newsletters put down an average of one additional application of Scotts products on their lawns each year,” says Lance Thornswood, vice president and director of interactive marketing at Tequila, Scotts’ Minneapolis-based marketing agency.
Scotts promotes its e-mail newsletters in magazine ads, on TV, and in banner ads on web sites such as Weather.com, MSN.com and Better Homes and Gardens’ BHG.com.
After learning from its customers’ lawn-care questions on its web sites and in its call center, Scotts e-mails problem-solving tips to all customers in specific regions with lists of suggested products to purchase in their local home-and-garden store, Thornswood says.
“If Scotts gets a lot of questions on lawn grub problems in North Dakota, for instance, it will e-mail advice about lawn grubs to all of its customers in North Dakota,” Thornswood says. The advice will also include a list of suggested lawn-care products, making it easier for customers to find what they need in their home-and-garden store, he adds.
Scotts uses web analytics from WebTrends and an e-mail marketing application from ExactTarget to collect information on customers’ interests and create customized e-mail newsletter campaigns. It also gathers information on web site visitors’ IP addresses from Akamai Technologies to get supplemental information on a visitor’s geographic locations. It then creates online cookies to associate future customer visits with their home location, enabling it to associate questions on lawn-care problems with specific states or regions.
Scotts also uses the newsletter sign-up to gather customers’ e-mail addresses and ZIP Codes.
The newsletter pitch is educational. After using sweepstakes or other offers to entice people to sign up for the newsletters, it found that consumers responded more to educational pitches, Thornswood says. Sweepstakes offers would create a surge in e-mail newsletter registrations, with many of the registrants canceling after the sweepstakes ended. But the educational pitches have won customers for the long term and converted them to more frequent customers, Thornswood says. “The ads tell people to get a better garden by signing up for a Scotts e-mail newsletter,” he says.
The educational approach also makes it easier to get newsletter recipients to fill out surveys regarding what they like about Scotts products, he adds.
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