E-mail helps specialty textile retailer keep its VIP customers in the loop
The Textile Studio, a specialty fabrics retailer that caters to homemakers and professional designers and interior decorators, is boosting revenues through promotional e-mail campaigns that generate a 50% open rate from its best customers, president Ray Rytel tells InternetRetailer.com.
“The sales days for our VIP customers are the best days we have,” Rytel says.
The Textile Studio, based in Cincinnati, operates nine stores across six states, where it competes with a number of fabrics stores. Key to its performance, Rytel says, is keeping its best customers happy and coming back for more. The trick is to get exclusive previews about coming sales to its VIP customers in markets stretching from Ohio to Pennsylvania and Georgia, without blasting the same information out to the general public, Rytel says.
So when it conducts major sales events that can run over two or three days, it uses only e-mail to let its best customers know about a special pre-sales day set aside for them. “We notify them two or three days in advance, because it gives us the opportunity to create a loyal customer base,” he says. Using ExactTarget to manage its e-mail campaigns, its e-mails to VIP customers include a link that lets them forward the invitation to a friend.
The strategy works so well, Rytel says, that The Textile Studio routinely gets 4 times as many sales from its best customers on special pre-sales days for which they had an advance notice, compared to subsequent sales days advertised to the general public. “We may get more than 300-400% of the revenue on average sales days,” he says.
The strategy also helps The Textile Studio to keep marketing costs down by relying mostly on e-mail as opposed to more costly forms of advertising, Rytel says.
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