Do not overstrain your employees

Do not overstrain your employees

King Arthur Flour Company e-commerce members are the second most visited bakery raw material company website. According to Holly Silver, director of Internet sales at King Arthur Flour Company, several hundred thousand participants in this program account for up to 30% of the total number of website visitors and Internet sales.

According to the head, her subordinates make an average of 10 to 15 mass mailings per month. In this case, a letter of the same content is sent to all recipients. But in 2010, the company began segmenting its database and doing direct mailings. The results were not long in coming.

Here are the average indicators for general mass mailings.

The proportion of email views is 30%

The share of clicks on links is 27%

Now let's compare them with the mailing rates after database sharding.

The proportion of email views ranges from 35% to 50%

The percentage of click-throughs on links ranges from 25% to 35%

“Compared to previous mass mailings,” continues Holly Silver, “both the percentage of email views and the percentage of clicks on links have increased significantly, and besides, there are practically no refusals to receive mailings in all segments.”

King Arthur Flour did not immediately introduce segmentation of its mailing list recipient database. During the gradual development of the strategy, employees under the leadership of Holly Silver had to overcome a number of difficulties. Next, we describe the tactics she applied and the lessons that her subordinates learned as they transitioned to the new strategy.

Tactic # 1. Justify the chosen segmentation strategy

As a rule, sharding the database in one go fails. There is a lot of preparatory work to be done. At the same time, motivation plays an important role in completing this work, thanks to which the project will be completed.

One of the motivating factors for the employees of King Arthur Flour was the desire to convey relevant information to individual representatives of the target audience, for example, those from buyers who are interested in gluten-free baked goods or wholesale of baked goods. Previously, the inclusion of such information in mass mailings of the company did not bring the desired results.

“For example,” says Holly Silver, “the majority of our target audience is flour bakers. If we send them information about gluten-free baked goods, they start unsubscribing. ”

Under these circumstances, the company's employees realized the need to segment the customer database. The company's employees wanted to single out certain groups among the target audience and make targeted mailings that meet the interests of a particular group. Such measures will also help to avoid the situation when highly specialized content is sent to the entire customer database, while for most of them this information is irrelevant.

“I believe,” continues Holly Silver, “that it is almost more important to prevent your customers from receiving information that is irrelevant to themselves than to prepare a mailing of highly specialized information for customers included in separate segments of your database. By sending clients information that is irrelevant to them, you risk becoming a "spammer" in their eyes. At the same time, many of the clients may even refuse to receive your mailings. "

Tactic # 2: Start with One Target Segment

King Arthur Flour did not jump head first into the abyss of database sharding. Its employees began to introduce a new approach based on material from one segment - their retail customers.

This approach helped the employees under the leadership of Holly Silver in three ways.

- Cope with unforeseen difficulties

The employees were able to overcome the growing difficulties associated with the transition to a new strategy in a limited space where they could control the process. In addition, Ms. Silver's colleagues worked through the migration and direct mailing process; they already knew what to prepare for when moving to the next segment of the target audience.

In particular, faced with difficulties in meeting deadlines for sending letters to retail customers, Holly Silver's colleagues developed four templates from which all other letters were subsequently composed. This allowed them, first of all, to save a lot of time on writing and checking letters and to switch their attention to the selection and creative processing of materials, which significantly increased the effectiveness of mailings.

- Implement flexible strategy

The first targeted email newsletter began as a daily update on the retail store's assortment and bakery menu. In the course of these actions, the employees were able to check email validity for free. Exactly https://getprospect.com/email-verifier helped them to do this. This helped to check the client's mail for validity. Since this is very important when sending email newsletters. The company then had to quickly switch from a daily mailing list containing detailed information to a monthly mailing list with only the basic facts.

“At first, it was incredibly difficult for us to get the material for the daily mailing. We diligently found out all the news of the cafe, delved into the menu of the bakery. But if the bakery did not find this or that raw material, then they had to promptly make changes to the menu. This presented certain technical difficulties for us. "

And yet, this method of switching to a new strategy for segmenting the target audience was much easier than if it was decided to work in parallel with several segments of the target audience (after all, in this case, it is quite possible that you would need to make your own adjustments).

- Checking the results

The experience of marketers shows that segmentation of the target audience and targeted mailings significantly increase the return on their work, instilling in them confidence in the correctness of the chosen strategy and the desire to gradually extend it to other segments.

“The number of email views increased, the number of customers who refused to receive mailings, on the contrary, decreased, and the number of clicks on links increased again,” sums up Miss Silver. - People received our letters and came to our store. Everything is simple and ingenious. "

Tactic # 3: Target Other Segments of Your Target Audience

The staff of the department, led by Holly Silver, identified six main segments of the target audience, representatives of which, most likely, would like to receive targeted information:

• customers who live and work near a retail store (see above)
• clients from Canada
• customers - wholesalers
• customers interested in gluten-free baked goods
• subscribers of the printed edition "Bread-making and baking"
• clients interested in the activities of the training center (King Arthur Flour Bakery School)

Employees of the company were previously aware of the presence of these groups among the general mass of their customers. In order to distinguish these groups, we used data on purchases made by customers, place of residence of customers, etc. So the addresses of customers who often buy gluten-free baked goods were added to the corresponding mailing list, and the addresses of customers who frequently order delivery to Canada were added to the Canadian customers list.

“It's pretty simple,” Holly Silver continues to share. - As soon as we applied this approach, we immediately found out that we have these clearly separate groups of clients who are hardly interested in the content of most of our mass mailings, but who, with all this, would be very interested in receiving regular mailings and information from us about important events when they happen. "

Let's give as an example a few more tactics that the company used in order to determine which of the target audience segments should be attributed to this or that client.

- Center for collecting information about customer preferences

Miss Silver's colleagues set up a so-called customer preference information center , where they processed information received by e-mail about what kind of information specific customers are interested in. Employees of the company check this list when sending each message by e-mail, and also strongly encourage customers to express their opinion when establishing contact.

- Registration process

Customers are asked to indicate what information they are interested in on the registration page . The information on the registration page almost completely matches the data seen by the employees of the customer preference information collection center.

- Rewarding clients

Holly Silver is looking at rewarding customers who complete the Customer Preference Information Center and update the information regularly. As an option, the presentation of prize coupons is considered.

Tactic # 4: Connect Internal Resources to Content Development

Content development and design is the most time-consuming part of the King Arthur Flour email marketing program, Holly Silver says. Each letter sent on behalf of the company contains a recipe that meets the needs of specific recipients. For example, those interested in gluten-free baked goods are sent the corresponding recipes, and those interested in studying at the School of Bakery are sent the baking recipes that are taught in class.

Holly Silver tries to adapt the materials that come to her from various parts of the company to include them in her e-mail newsletter. She emphasizes that she is very grateful to the company's employees, who often write articles for the blog, send recipes and do their best to help her.

“Other divisions are trying to contribute to the preparation of letters for each of the segments of our email newsletter,” says Ms. Silver. “And they also try to segment their databases like we did. Therefore, they willingly help us in the selection of materials for the mailings. "

Another source for Holly Silver's regular mailing list is marketing data and recipes that are prepared for other business units in the company. It only remains to modify them somewhat.

“We try to make the most of the off-the-shelf materials and make the most of them,” says Holly Silver. “All we have to do is adapt them, send them by e-mail and publish them on the website.”

Tactic # 5. Stay on schedule

Holly Silver's employees continue to do general mailings for all clients whose addresses are included in the database, but at the same time they also make direct mailings for clients assigned to a particular segment. According to Holly Silver, the biggest challenge here is keeping up with the mailing schedule for the different segments.

“We try to send as many emails a day as possible, but sometimes we can't keep up with the flow,” she continues.

For example, recently it was decided to run a free shipping promotion. Since the target audience was customers interested in gluten-free baked goods, the company's employees had to change the mailing schedule for this segment of the target audience in order to meet the timeline for the promotion. These kinds of conflicts happen all the time.

This is another reason for the gradual transition to a segmented customer base. Under the leadership of Holly Silver, employees were able to recognize in time the difficulties with the mailing schedule (the most significant of the difficulties they encountered) and to develop a scheme for overcoming them on the material of a single segment before transferring this approach to other segments.

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Created on Nov 24th 2021 04:55. Viewed 165 times.

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