Crystal Clear Results: Waterford Drives Holiday ’09 Sales through Aggressive Email Strategy
Luxury retailer surpasses revenue goals through email marketing
Waterford Crystal – one of the core brands manufactured, distributed and sold by WWRD, and one of the world’s leading luxury entertaining, home decorating, and fine gift manufacturers and retailers – thrived during the ’09 holiday season due to its new aggressive, and potentially risky, email marketing strategy. With the primary goal of increasing online revenue through the holiday season, Waterford worked with Listrak to change its email marketing to balance traditional branding strategies with much more frequent email campaigns to keep the brand top of mind and increase online sales at Waterford.com.
In a quest to increase sales, Waterford implemented a much more aggressive email strategy to increase reach and brand exposure. Keeping their traditional email campaigns for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Thanksgiving, Waterford deployed a total of 27 campaigns during a thirteen week period promoting new collections, holiday products, and gift giving ideas. To maximize the effectiveness of each campaign, Listrak closely monitored opens and reads, and implemented a customer engagement strategy by resending messages with a new subject line to subscribers who did not open the first message.
The strategy also included efforts to increase brand recognition and customer engagement. Listrak developed different creative and identified the two most effective email templates and made those the standard for every Waterford campaign. The templates creatively highlighted particular products and included clear purchasing calls to action. The consistent look made it easy for customers and subscribers to recognize the brand and relate to the products. Additionally, this approach greatly decreased the time and resources needed to create and deploy each campaign.
This aggressive email marketing strategy enabled Waterford to surpass online sales and revenue goals for the 2009 holiday season. In fact, when many online retailers, especially luxury retailers, were struggling in the poor economy, Waterford.com increased sales 37.3% over 2008, for the period of September 29 through December 31.
The customer engagement strategy proved successful as well in increasing customer engagement; by sending the second email to non-openers, Waterford encouraged an additional 64% of recipients to open, resulting in 68.6% more orders and 68% in additional revenue over the initial sends.
“Email is one of the most effective and cost efficient ways for us to stay top of mind with our consumers and drive our online sales,” said Joe Schmidt, Director of eCommerce, Americas for WWRD US, LLC. “Email marketing remains one of our top marketing priorities, as we plan to include more segmentation and automation with the goal of increasing engagement through relevant messaging that offers the greatest return on investment.”
To learn more about Listrak and how it can help you plan and integrate an email engagement strategy, contact us to today.
Listrak is an email marketing firm providing the solutions, software, and expertise to optimize the value of email. Listrak works with clients like Waterford, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Wolfgang Puck, and Movies Unlimited to develop engaging email marketing that goes beyond the inbox to the individual, to deliver the extra percent in effectiveness and ROI. Visit www.listrak.com to learn more.
WWRD, the leading provider of luxury home and lifestyle products worldwide, manufactures, distributes and sells well-recognized brands including Waterford, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Royal Albert, Minton, Johnson Brothers and Franciscan. WWRD maintains unique licensing arrangements with some of the most high-profile innovators in the home and lifestyle market, including Vera Wang, Jasper Conran, Monique Lhuillier, John Rocha, Barbara Barry, Gordon Ramsay, Martha Stewart and Michael Aram. WWRD products are distributed through premium department stores and independent retailers and wholesalers around the world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Australia and Ireland. The company employs more than 3,000 people worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.wwrd.com/.
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