According to AgilOne’s “The State of Personalized Email Marketing” study, 65% of marketers don’t differentiate email frequency by customer, and 52% of marketers don’t differentiate email content by customer. Those statistics are particularly resonant with online lighting and furniture retail Lumens.com, which began using AgilOne’s Email Edition tool to fix those issues—namely by shining light on its email content strategy, messaging frequency, and customer segmentation.
Sarah Schaale, marketing and communications manager for Lumens, says the online retailer primarily uses email to communicate with those who are already familiar with the brand. However, not being able to differentiate its engaged subscribers from its inactive subscribers prevented the brand from knowing how often it should contact people on its list and with what content.
To better identify its segments and measure frequency against these groups, Lumens implemented the Email Edition tool approximately one month ago. AgilOne VP of Products Anselme Le Van says the tool helps marketers detect the right frequency and content to connect with subscribers by measuring their behaviors (such as with open and click-through rates) and identifying three primary segments: the enthusiasts who are very engaged, the mainstream subscribers who display average engagement behavior, and the “sleepies” who are inactive subscribers. Schaale says that Lumens now sends an average of four emails per week and has scaled back on the number of correspondences with sleepies.
Once segments have been identified, marketers should target each segment based on interests and engagement levels, Le Van says.
“For customers that are highly engaged, you want to reward them but you don’t want to give too many discounts away because they are already very engaged,” he notes. “You don’t need discounts to be pushed to place an order, but you do need to deepen the relationship and that goes through special privileges, like super fast shopping.”
Schaale adds that Lumens uses a content calendar to gives its emails an editorial feel and have a wide range of content.
“If we have three promotions on, how can we spread them out so we add something that you might find on a blog or in a magazine that’s more interesting?” Schaale asks. “Maybe it doesn’t have big dollar signs attached to it, but I think it helps people connect with our brand and break up the mix…”
After implementing the tool, Lumens noticed a 4% increase in open rates among its enthusiast subscribers and a 1.2% increase among its mainstream subscribers within the first week, Schaale says. At the time of this writing, Lumens reported that it has now been able to decrease its unsubscribe rate among new subscribers by more than 50% by cutting back on touch frequency.
But Lumens is still in the dark when it comes to translating how open and click rates lead to sales.
“I guess I was a little disappointed with our first result because everyone opened it, [there was] not really a change in the clicks, and then not one sale,” Schaale says. “I think it needs to continue to go all the way through to really see what the end result is. I want people to read out email, enjoy our brand, and connect with it, but I also want them to buy things at the end of the day.”
