E-mail helps Wal-Mart Canada broaden sales in online photo service

Online photography represents the only version of e-commerce offered by Wal-Mart Canada Corp., but an e-mail campaign is helping the retailer broaden sales of the products and services offered through WalmartPhotoCentre.ca.

“We offer things that we think won’t sell, like photo blankets for $139, but e-mails on them get a great response rate,” says Joe Parkinson, director of marketing for PhotoChannel Networks Inc., which operates WalmartPhotoCentre for Wal-Mart Canada, a unit of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

PhotoChannel uses an e-mail marketing management system from EmailLabs. It sends out more than 100,000 e-mails a month for Wal-Mart at a twice monthly frequency that increases to weekly during the holiday season. Open, click-through and conversion rates are all running above industry averages, says Kyle Hall, executive vice president of sales and marketing for PhotoChannel.

Wal-Mart has been expanding its range of photo-related products, an effort that e-mail is helping to sell to shoppers by bringing images into their inboxes that are often timed to seasonal demand. The winter hockey season, for example, coincides with e-mails showing suggested gifts such as player cards inserted with photos of team members or coaches. For Mother’s Day, a big seller is blankets adorned with the image of child’s photograph. E-mails promotions have also been effective at promoting personalized photo calendars that can be designed to begin with any month of the year. “Instead of selling calendars in January and then offering them at 75% off the rest of the year, we can e-mail offers for photo calendars for Mother’s Day that runs from May to April,” Hall says.

The e-mail program is also helping to generate traffic to the 111 Wal-Mart Canada’s stores that provide for pick-up of online orders. WalmartPhotoCentre currently doesn’t offer home shipping.

PhotoChannel Networks, based in Vancouver, B.C., also runs e-mail marketing campaigns for three of the other 47 retailers for whom it provides online photography services.