Thursday, May 1, 2014

B2B Closeout E-mail Has Big ROI

Smart marketing can leverage b-to-b product cycles to generate profits and move excess inventory, per a recent case study from MarketingSherpa. Creative Co-Op, which markets trendy gift and home décor products to a core audience of independent retailers, needed to sell closeout inventory as product cycles got ready to shift. Their successful solution was an automated e-mail campaign tailored to past purchasers of products on closeout. Creative Co-Op's agency set up relational tables that scanned through customer data, matching past purchase history to closeout products to create a target audience of active customers who had ordered at least one of the closeout items within the past 90 to 365 days. The personalized, behavior-based e-mail campaign contained images of the closeout products purchased by recipients, the original product pricing, and closeout sale prices marketed as "Value Buys" at a fraction of the original. A second variation of the e-mail was sent 10 days after the first if the customer had not yet taken action. The closeout e-mail campaign yielded an 808% ROI in its first month, along with a 42% increase in order conversion rate and a 255% increase in closeout items sold online! After the campaign, the team also tallied that 84% of the items sold were actually non-closeout products. For more detail, see the MarketingSherpa case study at https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/b2b-email-behavior-based-campaign

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Use the Weather Map in Your Geo-targeted Marketing

Is your geo-targeted marketing in sync with the weather map? A Business2Community article recently reminded marketers that they should leverage weather as a variable in geo-targeted campaigns. Although author Ruthie Ackerman provided examples based on this winter's snowy and icy conditions, geo-targeting by weather variables can be applied to summer sizzlers, too! Retailing, travel and hospitality industries, and online banking are three areas that can use weather news to their advantage, she pointed out. For example, rather than cursing the polar vortex this past winter, smart apparel stores push cold-weather items, travel industry ads entice frigid consumers with a tropical vacation, and online banking could tap browser history and real-time e-mail to offer helpful vacation savings calculators to fund that tropical getaway. See the full post at http://www.business2community.com/marketing/leverage-weather-geo-targeted-marketing-campaigns-0773590