January 22, 2013

A Healthy Dose of Consumer Data Supplements Email Marketing

Supplement distribution company Natural Partners wanted to build healthier customer interactions. Its goal was to enhance its targeting and better identify consumers' communication channel of choice through email.

“Email is an anchor,” says Patti Renner, director of marketing for data, analytics, and digital solutions provider Knotice, which worked with Natural Partners on its email campaigns. “[It's] the cornerstone of both information and reach when it comes to the customer and to the audience base. If done well, email can provide a very personal, friendly touch that you just don't necessarily get with the random push notifications.”

Natural Partners created a daily deals email campaign and weekly email blasts to showcase products to its primary audience of health and wellness professionals. By using Knotice's Universal Profile Management system, a tool that combines customer data from different touchpoints to create a holistic profile, Natural Partners experienced its highest-ever email open rate.

“We were able to target down to people who wanted the email, we were able to create a landing page [from] that, and then we were able to get a 76% open rate on those emails,” says Brittany Johnson, marketing manager of Natural Partners.

“Not only are they sending, but they're sending smarter,” Renner adds. “They're getting better open rates because they increased their relevance…; they know whom they're sending to and they're really using their data to boost their campaigns.”

In addition to driving email open rates, Natural Partners was able to better identify who its target audience is based on a number of customer interactions, such as purchase history. “We assumed who we were speaking to, we assumed we knew who our client was, [and] we assumed we were communicating [with] them directly,” Johnson says. “With Knotice, we've been able to get that view at every angle to make sure that we're hitting our client appropriately.”

What's more, Johnson says that Knotice's Universal Profile system has allowed Natural Products to identify consumers' preferred channel of direct communication.

“We didn't know how many people were really responding through email,” Johnson says. “We found out that we have a lot more clients who prefer to respond and to be communicated [with] through email and not through some of the older channels, like the phone.”

Renner says analyzing customer data not only provides better targeting, but that it can also shorten the duration of AB testing. She adds that not analyzing that data can lead to a lack of consistency in multichannel messaging and message redundancy.

Johnson adds Natural Partners strives for message consistency between its social and email channels, yet admits that the company is still experimenting with using additional forms of communication. “It's kind of like telling a story,” she says. “One part of the story is email, the next part is what they see in social, and maybe the next part of the story is what happens when they visit Natural Partners or what happens when they talk on the phone to a representative. Everything throughout the experience [with] Natural Partners tells a story.”