The Creative Process
Listrak started the creative process by holding an internal meeting between its marketing team, professional services team, and DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s account manager in order to determine the correct course of action. First, they looked closely at DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s email campaign strategy and found that it was already sending re-engagement campaigns offering $5 off a $25 purchase to customers that have not made a purchase in over three months. For companies that are new to dynamic content, a re-engagement campaign is a good place to start. However, DiscountBeautyCenter.com was not using dynamic content to generate the emails. Instead, it used simple profiling to segment its list of more than 42,500 names. These emails generated the highest conversion rates for DiscountBeautyCenter.com, so Listrak made the decision to use the same offer but to expand the emails to cross-sell each customer based on their purchase history.
The first major challenge in doing this was the sheer number of products DiscountBeautyCenter.com sells. Listrak wanted to have the email campaign ready to send out within a matter of weeks and it did not have time to create 30,000 dynamic content containers for each of DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s products. It had to come up with a way to target a broader audience while still presenting relevant product offers.
One possible solution that the teams discussed was to pick the top selling products across DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s categories and send targeted email messages to the customers that purchased those products. For example, if someone recently bought a hair dryer, the customer would receive information on other appliances, such as diffusers, dryer stands, or flat irons.
Another possible solution was to cross-sell across the top four selling brands. For example, customers that previously purchased OPI nail care would receive information on new OPI products and customers that previously purchased Aveda hair care would receive information on Aveda products.
A third possible solution was discussed that would combine the two approaches. Instead of just using one dynamic content container for the brand or category level, Listrak would design an email that had two dynamic content containers for each item. This way, the emails would present information on each customer’s brand and product preferences while giving DiscountBeautyCenter.com the space to highlight the top selling products in each category.
The teams felt like this was the best approach but they knew they could not make a decision without any data to support their theories, so the account manager was asked to gather customer data to see if this was a viable option.
Because DiscountBeautyCenter.com had all of the data readily available, it took less than two hours for the product manager to mine the information from the database. For many companies getting started with dynamic content, this step presents a challenge as the companies have not collected enough data or the data is stored in different locations and it takes a lot of time and effort to pull it all together. For more information on the type and amount of data to collect, read Listrak’s white paper “Creating Relevant Email Campaigns with Dynamic Content.”
Using DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s customer data, Listrak found that the top four selling brands were Aquage, OPI, Helen of Troy, and Kenra, and it also found the top selling products in the hair care, skin care, cosmetics, nail care, appliance, and fragrance categories. Knowing what the top brands and products were, Listrak was able to design the layout of the campaign.
The new campaign featured one template with a common logo header, category navigation buttons that mimic DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s website, a large dynamic content container for the four different brands across the top of the email, and another dynamic content container for the top selling products in each of the six categories. The template also included an offer and call to action as well as the legal disclaimer at the bottom of the message.
With this many dynamic content containers, it meant there were 24 possible versions of the email that would be sent to DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s customers as each of the four brand containers could be matched with six possible category containers. Customers would receive the version based first on their brand preference, or the brand they bought the most, and then on their product preference, or the products they purchased the most. This way, the emails would fulfill the purpose of cross-selling each customer with targeted products based on their purchase history. If the contact did not fit into one of the brands or categories, he or she received the default versions. Listrak selected the Aquage brand as the default brand and hair care as the default category as these had the most number of sales in 2007 and would, therefore, appeal to the broadest audience.
