Working with many small independent specialty retailers I get my share of venting about how tough business is these days. So, when one of my clients calls me to take action to make his business better - I'm excited about it. One such client is John McDoweel the owner of Oslo's, a new brick and mortar menswear specialty store in Seattle.
John called me late in the day on Friday, (remember, he's two hours behind me as I'm in Chicago) and had a list of good customer who hadn't made a fall purchase so far this season. While we typically ask for a work week to plan and produce an email for clients and my wife had already put me to work at home to get our house together for a party that evening - I couldn't say no. I embraced John's opportunity to drive some business for the weekend and pulled out my laptop and went to work. Here's what we sent out. We used personalization with the full name in the "check" and the coupon that printed.
It's not our best work from a design point of view (actually I'm being kind with that description according to Tom Gwaltney who is our Creative Director at E-Mail Logic.) But, needless to say- it worked! Oslo's had a great weekend of business and using the tracking tools he has able to pinpoint which of it was directly attributable to the email. In addition he knows who was interested (the one's who clicked on the coupon) and can follow-up on the phone. John can go into detail, if he chooses by commenting on this blog. But, I'd say that the return on his last minute email covered what he pays us for the year.
Posted by: John McDowell on Friday, November 16, 2007
Several of my staff and I had commented recently that somebody had not been in to shop this season, or that favorite question of “whatever happened to” and so on? It was a bit embarrassing to then recall that I could pull that information from my Retail Management System with a few filters and sorts, and needless to say we were all a bit shocked once the list was generated. Good customers had been falling through the cracks, even with our attention to building relationship. These were customers that had been in multiple times and had spent thousand of combined dollars. It became clear that with E-mail logic’s system we could get an email out fast and hopefully get some of these customers back in the store for the weekend. In the first three days, over $5,000 was bought with this retention strategy. And the customers who were targeted were grateful, two had had babies in the last six months and just hadn’t had the time to shop, and the discount was just enough for the to make the drive over from across town. Often, I forget that I have assembled all the various tools that allow me to make fast decisions based on analysis from data that I have invested in. E-mail logic and John Fell were eager to assist, it was great to email on Monday with the results.