Cataloger Spotlight: Content Beats Promotion for Swiss Colony’s E-mail Campaigns

While it’s widely known that hard-sell e-mails with product offers can be effective, at least one cataloger successfully focuses 80 percent of its e-mails on providing benefit-driven content, such as style guides and recipes, which isn’t directly sales-related. The e-mail campaigns that Monroe, Wis.-based multititle cataloger The Swiss Colony develops for 10 of its catalogs take more of a soft-sell approach that works.

Aside from its namesake food gifts catalog, Swiss Colony's catalogs include Seventh Avenue (home furnishings, clothing, jewelry), Midnight Velvet (budget jewelry and gifts), The Tender Filet (gourmet foods) and Ashro (Afro-centric women’s apparel), among others.

Designed to develop good relationships between Swiss Colony and its customers, the process of putting campaigns together for 10 of its 11 titles involves creation and execution by three distinct teams, according to Steve Moon, senior Internet marketing analyst at Integrated Marketing Solutions, Swiss Colony’s marketing arm that operates as a separate company.

First, the brand team for each title determines the plan of action for an e-mail campaign, be it a promotion or a newsletter, Moon says.

Following the brand teams’ plans, a single creative team of copywriters and designers works across the catalog titles, developing copy and images that mimic the style for each brand.

The team then develops a list from the appropriate catalog’s housefile. Swiss Colony maintains its own data warehouse and executes all segmentation for each campaign. Although none of the brands uses personalization in any e-mails, Moon says he regularly segments based on recency, product affinity and average order value. A typical e-mail campaign goes to some 200,000 customers.

Additionally, the Internet team coordinates with the brand team to determine whether an e-mail requires a new landing page or if it can be directed to an existing category page.

From there, Moon’s Internet team uploads both the list and creative to Vertical Response, the company’s e-mail delivery provider. Vertical Response manages relationships with e-mail service providers such as Yahoo! and MSN, and runs Swiss Colony’s list against opt-outs.

While he won’t reveal the cost to send e-mails through Vertical Response, Moon says that Swiss Colony works off a cost-per-message structure. There were no startup costs, so as Swiss Colony has added more catalog titles, the only increase in cost has been commensurate with the increase in volume.

Moon points out that Swiss Colony’s tracking methods are somewhat unorthodox. To see whether the e-mails are profitable, he establishes a control group of customers from whom he withholds a particular e-mail campaign. As long as customers who receive e-mail are more profitable than customers who don’t, Swiss Colony continues to e-mail them.

The Rationale

While the level of e-mail sales and promotions vary by title, Moon notes that Swiss Colony’s brands generally shy away from excessive free shipping and percentage off offers. Just 20 percent of the e-mails are promotional in nature and the bulk of those focus on clearance items. “We try to stay away from training our customers to wait for sales,” he says.

Of the remaining 80 percent, about half of the those e-mails announce new or seasonal products and new Web site features. The final 30 percent of e-mails feature benefit-driven content created exclusively for Swiss Colony’s customers, such as recipes for food catalogs or style guides for the apparel brands.