This past week 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment broke a marketing campaign on Wednesday that it had thought up on Monday, targeting 8,000 customers using e-mail and direct mail to send out customized offers.
2nd Wind operates 105 stores in nine states in the Midwest and is the exclusive dealer for many national brands of exercise equipment in these territories. However, because the market for exercise equipment is broken up by geographic territory, 2nd Wind does not operate an e-commerce Web site or catalog. That has made it challenging to do any kind of multichannel marketing.
“We were limited in a lot of ways in how we’ve executed [our marketing message],” said Adam Lindquist, director of business development at 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment.
That is until several months ago when it deployed a new CRM platform from Juice Media Worldwide, San Diego, CA, which extracts data from multiple locations, builds individual customer profiles and automates the creation of campaigns.
In the case of last week’s campaign, 2nd Wind, Eden Prairie, MN, pulled the names of all the people who bought treadmills from the retailer in the past six months to offer them a free workout session in the store.
Not only is the summer a slow time for exercise equipment retailers like 2nd Wind, but owners of the merchandise also don’t use the items much at this time of year because they’re busy doing other things. The campaign was designed to help drive in-store sales and get customers to kick start their exercise regimens.
In addition to the free workout offer, the campaign includes a dollar-off offer on in-store purchases, with that amount varied by customer. In addition, some customers will receive e-mails while others, like VIP loyalty members, who already receive a substantial amount of electronic communication from the company, will receive direct mail only.
At 8,000 names, this is 2nd Wind’s largest campaign to date using the Juice Media platform. But results have prompted the company to think big, said Lindquist.
Every communication will be followed up by a phone call from a sales associate at the recipient’s nearest store.
“It is very important for us that, with the kind of money that customers spend with us, they feel appreciated,” Lindquist said. By following up with phone calls, the company regularly doubles the results of its campaigns, he added.
2nd Wind is also using the CRM platform to trigger alerts to its stores when customers sign up for its VIP program online, which is also followed up with a personal phone call.
Juice Media can also tell a store when a customer is clicking around on the site in a significant way and may need a phone call for some advice on how to use the equipment.
These features are “really helping 2nd Wind build business because they’re building a relationship with the customer,” said Rick Enrico, president/CEO of Juice Media Worldwide.
The Juice Media platform is available to small and midsize retailers generating between $50 million and $250 million in annual revenues.
In September, however, the company will introduce JuiceMetriqs, a CRM platform, for larger retailers. It will encompass the Juice Media platform along with a number of Web 2.0 capabilities.
[Full disclosure: Rick Enrico, president/CEO of Juice Media Worldwide is the son of Tony Enrico, founder/CEO of 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment.]With the results that the company is seeing so far from these multichannel efforts, it has decided to take a substantial amount of its marketing budget out of the traditional media outlets that it focused on in the past, such as television, newspaper, billboard, radio and guerrilla marketing, and move it into CRM-driven efforts.
