Nine West Guarantees Custom-fit E-mails

Imagine if your monthly e-mail newsletters were as individual as your customers’ buying habits.

Shoe retailer Nine West has enjoyed this impressive achievement since 2000. Through a partnership with online relationship marketing company Yesmail, Nine West sends myriad versions of its e-newsletter every month, each tailored around customers’ purchase history, ZIP code and/or buying channel. The efforts have increased both online and offline traffic, note company officials.

Always on the lookout to cut postal costs, as well as provide a more interactive shopping experience, Nine West chose Yesmail to provide highly personalized content to its 300,000-member opt-in database.

According to Dianne Binford, Nine West’s director of consumer direct marketing, the retailer segments its database in-house and sends targeted files to Yesmail. From there, Yesmail customizes Nine West’s e-mails around several variables, including store name of most recent purchase, regional offers and events, shoe size and width, reactivation benefits, loyalty program memberships, and various offers and promotions.

Ed Henrich, Yesmail’s vice president of client services, says his company can launch programs for merchants with comparably complex databases in just two to four weeks.

So far, Nine West’s results have surpassed expectations. For example, the merchant experiences clickthrough rates of 20 percent to 30 percent, and Web sales during the seven-day window after e-mail delivery increase 20 percent to 40 percent from pre-campaign online traffic.

Binford cites additional results for the company’s Easy Spirit brand, which utilizes the “Perfect Fit” program. Here’s how it works: Based on the shoe size and width a customer previously bought, the program anticipates which sizes and styles that customer may want to buy in the future. The program enables Nine West to send that customer an e-mail promotion based on those preferences. The plan seems to be working: A recent e-mail promoting hard-to-find shoe styles in double-widths yielded conversion rates four times greater than those for customers who didn’t get the offer.

E-mail customization also benefits offline sales; Binford says 70 percent of purchases made by e-mail recipients are made at the company’s retail stores. She says that while the monthly e-newsletters haven’t phased out direct mail, they’ve virtually replaced it as the company’s main means of communication with opt-in customers.