An estimated 250 billion emails are sent every day. That’s 2.4 million a second, and as many as 74 trillion a year. Sending emails to customers is easy, but do your messages stand out? Are they being read? And if they are, what return on investment are they producing?
Stokes, Canada’s largest kitchen, tableware and giftware sales company, got its start like any old-fashioned business – through a bricks-and-mortar store way back in 1935. Now, with more than 150 locations, it stands as Canada’s only national chain in the industry. So when the company’s email provider contract came up for renewal, Stokes E-commerce Director Daren Lach knew he wanted something more. He wanted personalized email campaigns, not just generic send-outs that weren’t even being opened.
Enter Oracle’s Bronto Software, a cloud-based commerce marketing automation platform that caters to mid-market and enterprise organizations. Ranked as the No. 1 email marketing provider to the global Internet Retailer Top 1,000, Bronto has a client roster of leading brands, including Vince Camuto, Lucky Brand, Theory, Björn Borg, Ashley Homestore and Christopher & Banks. After Stokes started using Bronto, the improvements to online customer connection starting rolling in one after the other.
“We’ve got a lot more awareness of how much revenue email was bringing in,” he added. “And now we can see the return on investment on every send and how it has increased over time.”
Stokes started sending customers emails they actually want to read.
“If someone has never bought dinnerware, we shouldn’t be sending emails featuring dinnerware. But if they’ve bought an espresso maker from us, we should tell them about our coffee accessories.”
The Bronto Marketing Platform allows for a much more targeted system when it comes to personalized email campaigns. The platform offers a full suite of sophisticated yet easy-to-use tools to execute commerce-centric programs through email, mobile and social marketing campaigns. Marketers can easily query and analyze information with the platform’s segmentation and reporting engines to execute individualized communications that drive repeat purchases.
When Lach signed on, he was happy to get onboarding help. “They don’t just give you a password and user name and send you off on your own.”
Bronto also helped him solve a dilemna with when to send emails. Before, Lach often faced competing opinions within his own department as to the best time to send. Platform test results were conclusive, however, and now his whole staff is on the same page.
“When you wear a lot of hats in e-commerce,” said Lach, “it really helps to be able to see very quickly how emails are performing and how many emails you have left in your allocation.”
Overall, Lach says he feels good that he can accomplish it with his current commerce marketing automation provider. “I don’t think I can outgrow Bronto.’
