Marketing is no longer an online/offline decision, Bombay learns
Merchants can never get too comfortable with the way
they run their marketing campaigns, particularly if they operate in a
multi-channel environment. Campaigns targeting customers through one
channel may be surprisingly more or less effective in a different channel.
Just ask home furnishings retailer Bombay Co., which
sells through stores, catalog and Bombayco.com. When it decided last fall
to mix a little more science with the art of e-mail marketing, placing
coupon codes on e-mailed coupons to track their redemption, it discovered
an unexpectedly strong preference among e-mail recipients for its stores
over its web site.
Bombay realizes that many customers prefer to sit in
its plush leather chairs and touch the woodwork on its coffee tables before
purchasing them—it just didn’t realize how much this in-store
experience could drive sales when combined with e-mail marketing.
For years, Bombay promoted only its web site in
e-mailed marketing promotions. But last November, it started tracking
e-mail coupons and discovered over the first two months that e-mail
marketing worked better than it had expected in promoting store as well as
web sales. “For every $1 that e-mail drives in online sales, it
drives $10 in store sales,” says Matt Corey, vice president of
e-commerce and marketing. “We expected to get a cross-channel boost,
but we didn’t expect stores to get 10 times online sales. And as we
continue to bolster our e-mail database with new customers, it will help
our stores that much more.”
Bombay’s promotional e-mail messages list stores
first as a place to use e-mailed coupons, with instructions on how to print
them out and redeem them in stores, followed by instructions on how to
redeem them at Bombayco.com. Bombay started with barcodes in the e-mail,
but customers had problems printing them out correctly, so it switched to
coupon code numbers. “A year and a half ago, our e-mail promotions
only drove people to our web site; it wasn’t a multi-channel
approach,” Corey says. “Now we tell people to use the coupons
in all of our channels: stores, online and catalog call centers.”
Moreover, by tracking the redemption of coupons with
codes, Bombay is able to see how well certain promotions do in different
geographic areas.
Corey says Bombay is also learning to better use e-mail
marketing to drive seasonal sales, such as with promotions of jewelry boxes
for Valentine’s Day, and to drive sales at its new and growing Bombay
Kids stores and web site. “We’ll drive more personalization in
e-mail this year,” he says. “If a customer tells us they have
girls or boys at home, we’ll e-mail them promotions about Bombay Kids
as well as Bombay.”
