Ross-Simons Hopes e-Dialog Deal Lifts E-Mail Revenues
Cataloger Ross-Simons is hoping a deal with e-mail marketer e-Dialog will help increase its e-mail-driven revenue so that it represents 15 percent of the company's Internet operations.Ross-Simons, Cranston, RI, hopes to improve upon last year's e-mail marketing campaigns, when the medium represented 10 percent of the revenue generated from the company's online programs. The cataloger of luxury items expects the deal with e-Dialog, which was announced yesterday, to improve its segmentation of files and consequently its conversion rates. E-Dialog, Lexington, MA, is a provider of precision e-mail marketing solutions.
Ross-Simons has four other online programs, including search engine placement, affiliate programs and partnerships. The company, which has been using e-mail marketing for 18 months now, has been mostly collecting e-mail addresses and testing messages.
"We're looking to refine our e-mail marketing program," said Anne Driscoll, director of Internet marketing at Ross-Simons. "The deal with e-Dialog represents an opportunity to partner with a company that will not just be a post office to send things out, but to help us target people much better and increase the conversion rates on the back end, not just increase click-through rates."
Driscoll said Ross-Simons would use the e-mails to complement the catalog by delivering e-mails to notify subscribers about upcoming books. Also, the company will distribute e-mails that will follow book droppings to inform subscribers when items from the catalog are added online.
During the next few months Ross-Simons will reconfigure its database and analyze data while it implements a rules-based program, Driscoll said.
