Michigan-based Wholesale Tools, which specializes in brand name tools for consumers and industry, has partnered with Sitebrand, an e-commerce software company, with the goal of targeting specific segments of customers, and targeting marketing offers to specific geographic locations.
Wholesale Tools, which operates seven store locations in the US and offers a catalog with more than 800 pages, had found it was not optimizing its Web site to market to and engage customers. To that end, one campaign that it launched with Sitebrand was a “first customer campaign,” said Jason Cherwak, online marketing manager at Wholesale Tools.
“If a customer had never been to our Web site before, they were shown a marketing banner that offered 5% discount on their first order or a free tool,” he said.
Cherwak noted that prior to that, the site had a generic banner that would pop up anytime anyone visited the site with the same offer, but no way of knowing if returning customers were also using it.
“We sometimes had offers that were being clicked on by the wrong audiences, or were not being marketed to the proper customer,” he said. “Being able to present a specific campaign to a specific visitor is a great marketing tool.
Wholesale Tools also launched a campaign with Sitebrand to geo-target online customers in specific regions.
“We would get a lot of comments on customer orders saying that they didn’t know there was a store location near them,” Cherwak said.
He used a Sitebrand application to enable a banner to appear on the Web site informing customers there is a store near them. This was done by using the “city” field as a triggering rule if a customer entered a home address that was in the vicinity of a store.
“The whole idea we had was to be able to further market to customers online more than we were, and also drive them to the stores and catalog, and we have been able to do that,” he said.
