Borders’ e-mail drives millions in weekly store sales, Jupiter says
Borders.com doesn’t sell online, but its e-mail program helps drive millions of dollars in store sales each week, according to a report on Borders’ loyalty program by JupiterResearch.
In the program Borders launched last year with e-mail services provider CheetahMail, e-mail delivers not only information on products but also Borders Rewards coupons for registered members, which can be used for savings in the store. To date, according to Jupiter’s report, “Borders Uses E-mail Marketing to Drive Off-line Store Traffic and Revenue,” Borders has collected more than 12.5 million e-mail addresses from customers who register for the program. This is largely as the result of incentives encouraging cashiers at the point of sale to collect the addresses and enroll shoppers in the program, according to Jupiter.
With two different e-mail programs, Borders Monthly allows customers to select the categories and product types for which they want to receive an e-mail update each month, while the Borders Shortlist, e-mailed each week, carries the coupons for store redemption.
The program’s success, according to the report’s author, Jupiter research director David Daniels, has allowed Borders to “perform more targeting to deliver relevant and timely communications to its clients while propelling business goals of growing revenue and building customer loyalty.”
After December, Borders will move toward an e-commerce site of its own, after fulfilling e-commerce sales on Amazon.com’s platform since August 2001. The company has said it will use a yet-to-be named third-party provider for fulfillment and build a new internal e-commerce engine, using IBM WebSphere, that will consolidate all of its web sites, including Borders.com and Waldenbooks.com, onto a single platform. Currently Amazon is responsible for the fulfillment of all Borders’ products sold online.
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