Birkenstock Central gets a revenue kick from email
by Paul Demery
Published in Internet Retailer 6/1/2011
Email marketing is driving 25% of sales, the web-only footwear retailer says.
With a new email marketing strategy launched earlier this year, web-only footwear retailer Birkenstock Central is finding that shoppers who arrive at the site via email are 22% more likely to buy than other visitors, says Jim Moore, president of The PSNE Group, the retailer’s parent company.
Email marketing is also producing an average order value that’s 8% higher than the site’s average, and it’s generating about 25% of the site’s overall revenue, Moore says.
BirkenstockCentral.com, PSNE Group’s initial and flagship e-commerce site, which sells mostly Birkenstock footwear, is going through a rebuilding effort that began last year with a migration to a new e-commerce platform from technology vendor Whirlwind Ecommerce. Once the new platform went live in January, one of the e-retailer’s first marketing initiatives was to deploy a new email marketing system from Listrak. That email technology replaced an in-house system that was difficult to manage and produced poor email deliverability rates, Moore says.
With the combination of Listrak and the new e-commerce platform, he adds, BirkenstockCentral.com can more efficiently and effectively manage email marketing campaigns. For example, the retailer has been able to integrate its in-house inventory management system and its new e-commerce platform with the Listrak email system to automate email offers to customers who signed up to be notified when out-of-stock merchandise is back in stock. Such integration, Moore says, would have been too costly and time-consuming with his former e-commerce platform.
These “Back in Stock” emails have produced an average clickthrough rate of 20.73% and a sales conversion rate of 22.73%, Moore says.
In addition to the back-in-stock emails, the e-retailer also sends two other types of targeted emails based on customer activity—a welcome series of emails sent to site visitors who have signed up to receive email from BirkenstockCentral, and emails sent to shoppers who have abandoned shopping carts. All together, these three behavior-based email campaigns have accounted for about 23% of the retailer’s revenue from email, even though they represented only about 1% of the marketing emails the retailer has sent, Moore says. In the welcome emails, the retailer sends promotional offers immediately after a shopper signs up to receive email. New email subscribers who have not yet purchased on BirkenstockCentral.com receive a special offer for free socks with an order of $50 or more; the offer is repeated twice more at two-day intervals. The average clickthrough rate for all welcome emails is 39.72%, and the average sales conversion rate is 17.70%.
When a shopper places item into a shopping cart but does not purchase, the retailer sends an initial email three hours after the cart is abandoned, saying “Thanks for stopping by, your items are waiting for you.” If the shopper doesn’t respond, the retailer sends a second message three days later; if necessary, it sends a third message after another three days with an offer of a 5% discount on the items in the abandoned cart. The average sales conversion rate for the first message is 15.65%, the second message 13.58% and the third 11.76 %.
With a strong double-digit conversion rate on the third message, Moore says he’s considering extending the series to four or five messages. “We may still get close to a 10% conversion rate,” he says.
Moore adds that the success of his cart abandonment emails, which produce an overall average clickthrough rate of over 37%, has also convinced him to consider using a display ad retargeting service. When shoppers visit a web site and view products without making a purchase, a retargeting system will present them with related display ads on subsequent sites they visit.
“If we’re doing this great with a 37% email click-through rate, I only need half of that rate to make a retargeting campaign worthwhile,” Moore says.
PSNE Group also operates three other retail footwear sites: GroundedSoles.com, ChefShoes.com and MedicalShoes.com.