Motorcycle Superstore drives up sales with segmented e-mail campaigns

With a new e-mail management and web analytics system, Motorcycle Superstore is driving up sales with a marketing program that has increased from zero to 40% the amount of e-mail targeted to customer segments, director of marketing Erick Barney tells InternetRetailer.com.

Using a hosted e-mail management system from ExactTarget integrated with a SmartView web analytics application from WebTrends Inc., the online retailer of motorcycle parts and accessories has also increased its frequency of e-mail marketing campaigns to weekly from monthly, and its open rates for customer segment-targeting e-mails have been as high as 40%, compared to 20% for the overall average open rate, Barney says.

As a result, he adds, e-mail marketing has gone from being his third most productive marketing tool – behind top-ranked search engine marketing and affiliate marketing – to being a close second to search. “It’s almost neck-and-neck with search engine marketing,” he says, noting that e-mail marketing is on course to produce $1.3 million in sales in the current fourth quarter, up from $302,000 in the same quarter last year. Overall sales, meanwhile, are expected to come in at $15 million this year, up 25% from $12 million in 2004, he says.

Motorcycle Superstore does nearly all of its sales online at Motorcycle-Superstore.com, with a small percentage through its single outlet store at its Medford, OR, headquarters, Barney says.

With the ExactTarget and WebTrends application, the retailer has been able over the last several months to build targeted lists from an already narrow market niche. Its customer base is made up mostly of male motorcycle enthusiasts between ages of 21 and 38. In the past, Motorcycle Superstore didn’t have the customer information to support segmented marketing within its niche or to back more frequent e-mails, Barney says.

But now it sends out general opt-in e-mails that let recipients click a link related to their preferred type of motorcycle—sport, cruiser or off-road—and uses the ExactTarget/WebTrends application to analyze and build lists of customers based on their area of interest. In a recent holiday kick-off e-mail promotion segmented for the three types of customers, open rates came in at 40% for recipients of e-mails related to merchandise for sports-style motorcycles, 38% for cruisers and 36% for off-roaders, Barney says.