The Bombay Company’s Winning Formula

Furniture and home accessories multichannel merchant The Bombay Company has made aggressive strides into e-mail marketing during the past two years. The results have been worth the effort, says Matt Corey, vice president of marketing and e-commerce.

The Bombay Company has 650,000 opt-in names on its e-mail list and successfully integrates its campaigns with those of its retail, catalog and e-commerce channels. Donna Loyle, editor in chief of Catalog Success, asked Corey to share the secrets of his success in e-mail marketing.

Catalog Success: What mechanisms did you use to go from 20,000 opt-in, or registered, e-mail names to 650,000 in only two years?
Matt Corey: We used our store personnel, online contests and promotions, and other methods. Early on we ran a registration drive. If customers signed up we’d give them 10 percent off their next order — for sales made within a certain time frame, of course. When customers realize they can get advance notice of sales and special offers, they usually say, “Sure, I’ll sign up for your e-mail list.”

Last year we used an e-mail append service in which we sent out all of our customer names, and that was helpful in building our e-mail list. And we have ongoing e-mail registration in which we leverage our store personnel for help.

CS: How did you convince store personnel to help gather names?
Corey: At first, some were a bit leery about it and thought the Web was a competitor to them, but they soon learned it wasn’t. Everyone uses the Web now for research, even our store associates.

Sometimes we’ll send an e-mail campaign, and within an hour, customers show up at the stores with their e-mail printouts in hand looking for the offer in the store. That has convinced store associates that e-mail is a great way to drive store traffic.

CS: How often do you send e-mail campaigns?
Corey: A couple of times a month. We increase frequency slightly in the fourth quarter. But we’ll always keep it manageable.

We want to start some personalization techniques, too, by offering different types of content depending on the e-mail recipient. For example, some customers like to shop in Bombay Kids. We could ask them if they have boys or girls, because we wouldn’t want to send an offer picturing a boy’s bedroom set to someone who has three girls. We’ll allow customers to tell us how much personalization they want.

CS: How did the company get started in e-mail marketing? What were the arguments that convinced upper management this was a marketing avenue worth pursuing?
Corey: We got started in e-mail marketing early in 2002, and had no resistance from upper management. It’s a low-cost way to drive sales. It costs less than half a penny to send an e-mail. So deciding to market via e-mail is a no-brainer.

CS: You’ve stated elsewhere the goal of Bombay’s e-mail campaigns is to drive store sales. Do you also track if the e-mails drive online or catalog sales?
Corey: Yes, we put a tracking code on the e-mail messages, so we know how many e-mails converted to store, online and catalog sales.

CS: Have any examples of particularly successful e-mail campaigns?
Corey: In February, we ran an e-mail exclusive, three-day sale over a weekend, and did more than $1 million in sales across the business.

CS: Which channel accounts for most sales?
Corey: Most of our sales still come in via the retail channel.

CS: How does Bombay undertake the formidable task of integrating its e-mail campaigns into the company’s overall marketing campaigns? Do you have a dedicated e-mail marketing team, or are they part of the e-commerce group?
Corey: We make sure we leverage all of our channels. We have a really cooperative team here, with designers and marketing associates sitting only a few feet away from one another.

CS: Do they work together to integrate your offers, products and featured merchandise?
Corey: Yes, all of the above. You know, some catalogers still struggle with this because they haven’t yet integrated their marketing and Web teams. We have one person in charge of creative for our e-mail designs, and she works with many others here at Bombay to be sure we’re sending the right message at the right time. It’s a cooperative effort.

CS: What metrics do you track for your e-mail campaigns? And which do you find are the most helpful and why?
Corey: Sales, sales, sales. That’s the most compelling metric. No, seriously. The other metrics can tell you trends that are interesting and informative, but at the end of the day, we look at sales.

CS: How do you turn those metrics into elements you can use in your marketing initiatives?
Corey: We test designs, subject lines and offers all of the time. We continue to tweak the e-mail campaigns. Then we track open rates and sales. We’ve actually done a lot of testing these past two years.

CS: What lessons have you learned from all of that testing?
Corey: We once ran a four-day weekend sale, which we do from time to time. The offer was for $50 off a purchase of $200 or more. The subject line was: “Save $50 on a purchase of $200 at The Bombay Company.” But it needed a sense of urgency, for example: “This weekend only, save $50 ...”

You also have to be careful with the words you use in your subject line and in the body of the e-mail message. Some words will trigger the ISPs to put your message in people’s bulk e-mail folders.

CS: Do you have double opt-in for e-mail signups?
Corey: No, but someone has to go to our site to sign up for it. We’ll send a confirmation thanking them for signing up, and on that confirmation there’s a way for them to unsubscribe if they want. And then in every e-mail campaign, we offer a really clear way to unsubscribe. Some merchants make unsubscribing a difficult process by burying the unsubscribe link or making people take 14 steps to unsubscribe. That’s just not smart.

CS: Why did you select Silverpop as your e-mail delivery provider and Coremetrics for analytics?
Corey: Bill Nussey, the CEO at Silverpop, is a very bright individual. I trust him. E-mail delivery is becoming a commodity business, and yet I need my e-mail provider to be six to 12 months ahead of me in technological know-how.

Same thing with Coremetrics. They’re not the cheapest analytics provider around, but they offer great features, such as ROI [return on investment] metrics on everything I need. And I believe in Brett Hurt, Coremetrics’ founder. Both of these companies have strong technologies and great leaders.

CS: How will you expand your database to 750,000 opt-ins?
Corey: We’re thinking about a sweepstakes of some sort, maybe something with Bombay Kids. If you sign up for e-mails you could win a kid’s bedroom suite.

CS: IBM previously ran your e-commerce platform, but you’ve switched to Amazon. Why?
Corey: We chose Amazon because we want to take our e-commerce initiatives to the next level.

Amazon’s platform is a performance-based model, which we liked. And it offers stability and scalability.

CS: Looking at the progress you’ve made in the last two years with e-mail marketing, what are the top lessons you’ve learned about marketing in this channel?
Corey: First, if you’re a multichannel marketer, you really can’t do it without the help of store associates talking up your e-mail list and the offers customers can get by signing up for it.

Second, you have to balance your message, meaning you can’t over-message your customers or they’ll quickly lose interest.

Third, and we really haven’t taken full advantage of this yet, you have to offer content — in our case, decorating tips.

Fourth, it has to be customer friendly. People still, even today, expect something to go wrong during an online ordering process. They hold their breath during checkout. You have to set up a great customer experience, and then maintain that focus.

CS: What mistakes do you see other merchants make in e-mail marketing?
Corey: Those who make single-channel offers — that is, offers good only online or in a store — well, that’s just a fundamental multichannel operational problem. It broadcasts, at least to me, that the company still has trouble with its multichannel integration. Three years ago, single-channel offers were OK, but not any more. Today’s customers demand that offers be the same across all of a retailer’s channels.

CS: What advice would you offer other merchants who want to improve their opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns?
Corey: Make sure you have the support of all of your channels in your e-mail marketing business. Also, leverage available technologies and analytics. The great thing about e-commerce is that you can measure a whole lot of stuff. It’s all very trackable.