EMAIL MARKETING
Holiday Greetings?

By Susan Breslow Sardone

With a tough 2001 holiday season looming for retailers, email marketers are meeting the challenge head-on with strategies and technology designed to promote sales both on and offline.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11 -- and the weeks that followed -- business ground to a halt. For catalog marketers who had dropped pieces in the mail immediately beforehand, that spelled potential disaster.

"It's understandable that consumers couldn't focus on catalogs at that point," says Al DiGuido, CEO of email marketing firm Bigfoot Interactive. "Yet the holidays will not be postponed this year. There will still be gift-buying and gift-giving. But those companies that already put catalogs in the mail are looking at the money they've spent and wondering how they can recoup and salvage some of those lost opportunities.

"Email can be a key strategic asset throughout the fourth quarter for any retailer," says DiGuido. "It has been proven effective in raising customer awareness, is cost-efficient, and offers targeted capabilities. In addition, email provides marketers with timely customer intelligence and the power to encourage sales right up until the last minute of the holiday season."

Content such as special offers, sales alerts, and relevant and targeted messages to different audience segments is particularly effective. Bigfoot has identified 48 segments on behalf of client Fingerhut, a major catalog merchant, and has been issuing emails that contain 10 percent savings offers, contextual messages based on past-purchase behavior, and Spanish-language emails to appropriate recipients.

To aid other customers in driving sales quickly, Bigfoot Interactive also has launched a Holiday Jumpstart Program, a customizable, turnkey email marketing solution. The program's five components consist of creative templates with test cells, customer-survey pages to illuminate future spending plans, a predictive model that identifies key prospects, an opt-in list of up to 100,000 names, and one-time delivery.

If emails alone don't drive customers to the Web to buy, perhaps the answer is to send an email that is a catalog in itself. Mobular Technologies and BGDI are both now offering systems that can deliver complete catalogs to the desktop via email.
BGDI's Desktop Catalog, a Buylink software product, enables a user to download software via an email to the user's computer. A company's catalog or other information is then accessed from an always-visible desktop icon. Content is automatically updated in the background every time the user's computer is online.

Mobular Technologies, formed last spring by two former NASA rocket scientists, has as its motto: "If you can't bring people to your store, bring your store to the people." The company's engine is able able pull and integrate content from any online source and format it into a graphical email catalog as small as 3k.

According to Jerry Zeephat , director of marketing communications, "We can combine content with a search engine and navigation tools. Then we bundle it with automatic compression and decompression functionality. The net result is an entire searchable catalog stored in your computer's browser or email cache.

"Customers can browse the catalogue even when they're offline, and there's no delay for those on slow connections since the entire catralog and search engine run on the user's computer. Companies don't have to fund numerous servers and content can be updated on a moment's notice and automatically revised the next time the user connects to the Internet."

So far only a few companies have jumped on the e-catalog email bandwagon. We'll know the format is a killer app when the annual Neiman-Marcus Dream Book arrives in our email box in such a format.

Copyright © 2001 Susan Breslow Sardone

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