Jones Apparel moves its e-mail marketing database to the next level
A newly automated and streamlined program is helping Jones Apparel Group achieve higher open and click-through rates for its e-mail marketing campaigns. But more important the new e-mail marketing program, which is based on technology and database services provided by Yesmail Inc., a subsidiary of infoUSA Inc., is enabling Jones to more quickly and efficiently personalize and analyze its campaigns.
Jones, which ranks No. 268 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, operates e-commerce sites for three of its brands, including NineWest.com, EasySpirit.com and Bandolino.com. Since NineWest.com was launched five years ago, Jones has collected online customer information across multiple channels and stored the information in a central database. But the process of analyzing information, extracting certain fields of information and then formatting the data in ways that deliver personalized e-mail messages to shoppers was time consuming, says Dianne Binford, vice president of multi-channel marketing for Jones.
“We had rich customer detail in our database, but it was a very exacting process to plow through many fields and processes in order to customize about seven elements in each customer`s e-mail,” Binford says. “It was a full-time job customizing and formatting the personalized data we needed for each of our monthly online newsletters."
Over the last year Jones has worked with Yesmail to streamline the e-mail marketing program. As a result, Jones has improved its opened e-mail rate on some campaigns by as much as 25%. The new program also lets Jones more quickly analyze and make instant changes to its e-mail campaigns, including subject lines changes. For instance, Jones will often segment its list and may e-mail a personalized newsletter with a fashion-oriented subject line to one group of customers and then a subject line advertising an upcoming promotion to another segment. To produce better results, Jones will first test multiple subject lines with different segments of its e-mail marketing lists and then analyze the results.
“We test four subject lines among various customer segments during the first hour and then use the winning subject line for each customer segment for the remaining deployment,” says Binford.
A streamlined e-marketing program is helping Jones generate response rates and other metrics that are higher than the retail industry average, Binford says. “Our deliverability rate is 8% higher, our open rate is 8% higher and our click-through rate is about three times higher,” she says.
Back...
