E-mail technology comes up roses for Proflowers.com

Successful marketing results from Proflowers.com, a floral e-retailer, demonstrate that personalized email messaging increases customer retention and improves marketing efficiency, says Looking Glass Inc., a Denver-based marketing strategies company. Proflowers used Looking Glass' Cohorts household-based market segmentation system that identifies 27 unique and cohesive groups of consumers. When applied to the Proflowers customer database, Cohorts enabled Proflowers to understand its consumers, strengthen relationships with existing customers and cost-effectively target new customers. Versioned e-mail messages for Proflowers' most important Cohort groups were formed using the Cohort-encoded customer information. When compared with an unversioned control message, the Cohort-encoded personalization campaign delivered 35% higher overall response rates. The strategy also significantly increased the size of an average order.