With an innovative multi-channel marketing strategy, Ross-Simons is leveraging the web, its stores and catalog to expand its customer base while refocusing its product line more closely on jewelry, Terry Matthies, vice president of information technology, tells Internet Retailer.
Ross-Simons does over $250 million a year in sales through 14 stores, including 11 full-line stores and three outlets, 60 million mailed catalogs and Ross-Simons.com. The web site does over $50 million in sales, or about a fifth of overall sales, Matthies says.
With its history in selling jewelry and other luxury items, the Cranston, RI-based retailer has branched out into other product lines like home décor and housewares, selling such practical items as tableware. But now Ross-Simons is refining its merchandising strategy to more closely tie it to jewelry and increase profits, Matthies says.
Ross-Simons is also reducing and refining its tableware offerings and planning to discontinue its bridal registry. “Now if it’s not jewelry, it’s mostly jewelry accessories or fine collectibles,” Matthies says. "The merchandising strategy is to build off the jewelry base."
Meantime, Ross-Simons is taking several steps to increase its customer base of multi-channel shoppers. It offers special incentives like gift certificates and days off to store associates who get the most e-mail addresses of new customers, for example. With its expanded e-mail list, it’s using a combined automated telephone and e-mail system that delivers recorded messages to customers’ phones alerting them to a special offer in a nearby store that has just been e-mailed to them.
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