The web makes customer segmentation easier, Scholastic says
Having a web site can help an organization segment its customers and serve them more effectively, Donna Iucolano, division president of e-Scholastic and general manager of Scholastic.com, will tell attendees at the eTail 2004 East conference in Fort Lauderdale, FL, next week.
The challenge is in making sure that messages to the various segments are consistent with corporate goals. “We maintain consistency by giving each channel a calendar of activities by the day and the week so everyone knows what’s live in each channel at any given point,” Iucolano says.
Consistent marketing is also crucial, she says, and so Scholastic centralizes marketing functions. “Marketing cuts across channels,” she says.
Scholastic.com presents separate material for five audiences: classroom teachers, parents/family, children, librarians and school administrators. “The five groups all have different needs,” she says.
The Internet has helped the company focus on the element that ties all the channels together: the needs of the children, Iucolano says. “Our orientation was very product and channel focused before,” she says. “We had not been customer focused. But over the past six or seven years, the Internet has been a forcing agent for us to become customer focused.”
Other retailers can learn from Scholastic’s experience, she says. “We have been able to leverage the core brand, and other retailers should be able to do the same thing,” she says. “Their challenge has been that many have not profited because customers do not know that a particular catalog is part of some parent that they may know already.”
Iucolano will be speaking at 3:30 on Wednesday in the Track A break-out session.
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