Segmented e-mail marketing pushes up open rates for BareNecessities.com
A push into segmented e-mail marketing lists is paying dividends for BareWeb Inc., which owns and operates BareNecessities.com.
Prior to segmentation, BareWeb would send weekly generic electronic newsletters to its opt-in list of more than 400,000 subscribers. The content was focused on weekly specials, new product arrivals and general news. But the web site’s primary customers—women shopping online for specific brands, styles and sizes of intimate apparel—are highly specialized.
To deliver better targeted messages and boost overall sales and conversions, Bare Necessities analyzed its e-mail list and divided the list into six distinct segments. On BareNecessities.com, No. 276 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, the company also added more coding that now automatically “tags” a customer and posts the name to a particular segment once she has completed a transaction.
With better list segmentation, BareWeb now e-mails out weekly newsletters to specific customer segments that feature new deals and product arrivals on their favorite brands, specific product recommendations and other targeted content. “We don’t have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ customer, but that’s the previous e-mail marketing approach we were using,” says David Wauters, BareNecessites.com director of marketing. “Our weekly campaigns are much more focused.”
List segmenting has helped the online retailer’s e-mail open and click-through rate to increase by about 10%. Better e-mail marketing also helped BareNecessities.com grow sales by about 43% in 2006.
Over the course of several months the company conducted weekly meetings among diverse departments to identify shopper segments. BareNecessites.com also used analytics to study patterns of shopper frequency, transaction histories and product favorites, then used the measurements to group customers into the new segments. “The new segments help us focus on upcoming campaigns and generating the dynamic content for those campaigns,” Wauters says.
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