DMNews speaks with Peter Kosciewicz, CMO of The Eastwood Company, about the company booted its e-mail program.
Q: What had made The Eastwood Company’s customer e-mail program unique, and what changes did you decide to make?
A: Like lots of companies, we used to send out e-mails based on self-identified demographics, such as if the recipient considered himself a casual or avid hobbyist. But we’re interested in scoring our e-mail list based on a recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) analysis. Since January, we’ve been using iPost’s Autotarget platform, which creates lists for specific campaigns based on responses to previous campaigns by automating RFM value segmentation.
Q: How does this work?
A: If we wanted to send out a clearance e-mail, for example, we could pull in the data from the last five e-mails we sent out and identify the customers and who responded. Additionally, Autotarget can identify customers who share the same RFM characteristics as those from the clearance list but to whom we haven’t e-mailed a clearance communication previously. This way we’re sending out fewer e-mails, the number of people opting out of receiving e-mail from us has gone way down and our cost of delivery has declined.
Q: What results have you seen?
A: Where we might have sent out 220,000 e-mails in the past for a campaign, we’re now getting the same or better results with between 30,000 and 40,000 e-mails. We’ve experienced a 20% increase in e-mail marketing revenue, a 14% reduction in the number of opt-outs and decreased e-mail marketing costs by 25%.
Q: Are you doing more or different kinds of e-mails campaigns as a result of using Autotarget?
A: We’ve been mixing up our campaigns to see what works. In the past, we’d experimented with sending out e-mails offering daily specials on a single product, but had decided to back off this strategy for fear of overwhelming our list. With Autotarget, we’ve been able to zero in on those customers who value receiving regular communications of this sort and who will respond to them. We’ve even received feedback from customers thanking us for the daily e-mail specials. It’s not often that someone thanks you for sending them an e-mail.
