Women’s apparel retailer J. Jill generally balances its promotional strategy across its store, catalog and web channels. But it also successfully uses another strategy: that of e-mail offers to drive business to a specific channel or a specific category of business, often with a cross-channel effect, director of sales promotions Alex Viteri tells Internet Retailer.
“For instance, based on business patterns, we may send out an e-mail early in the week to coincide with the timing of a catalog drop. Or we may send out a retail-specific offer later in the week to try to coincide with weekend shopping in stores,” says Viteri.
J. Jill also taps into what it’s learned about a customer’s shopping pattern to target its audience for e-mail offers. “We want to be as convenient for customers as we can be, and they can shop however they want to. But we do notice how a customer chooses to shop most frequently, and sometimes there are offers that go out to specific audiences based on their preferred method of shopping,” says Viteri.
For example, if the company is interested in promoting its petites line, it can determine based on shopping patterns which customers are most likely to respond to offers in that category. E-mails about a customer appreciation night scheduled at particular J. Jill stores are targeted according to what the data show about which customers shop those stores most frequently.
Customers who most often shop direct may get a review of an online sale by e-mail, while customers who most often shop stores may receive an online coupon to be redeemed in stores. E-mail offers redeemable in the store use a promotion code that the shopper can mention to the store associate, though Viteri says customers also can print out the e-mail offer and bring it into the store to be scanned.
Viteri notes that the web site, launched along with stores in 1999 after J. Jill’s catalog presence was established, has become a key growth vehicle for the company. In addition to sales driven by its e-mail strategy, “ A lot of customers receive the catalog and go online to make purchases now as opposed to picking up the phone,” he says.
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