Baby Supermall: Convert Online Sales Through Email Marketing
Baby Supermall has been a leader in online sales of baby products since 1997. Operating out of a 75,000 square foot facility outside of Chicago, IL, Baby Supermall provides high quality products at low prices, with fast delivery and award winning customer service. Among their awards, BizRate.com has named them as a Circle of Excellence Gold Honoree. Baby Supermall also consistently ranks above their competitors in positive customer feedback, typically ranking above 90%.
With a growing email list, Baby Supermall soon realized the need for email marketing. As an Amazon.com store, Baby Supermall is constantly working to keep up with growing demand. Baby Supermall is proud to have a majority of their inventory in stock, and that customers pay only when their item ships.
Challenges:
Baby Supermall’s customers often purchase on an as needed basis. A vast majority of their sales, over 90%, is for baby bedding products. Baby bedding is especially hard to resell or upsell, leaving Baby Supermall with the challenge of encouraging buyers to purchase again.
This challenge led Baby Supermall to establish the following goals:
- Increase sales
- Increase the number of repeat visitors
- Create Brand Awareness
Baby Supermall began sending out small email campaigns to a select group that included a small discount. Soon, it was clear that they needed a more robust email marketing solution to accommodate the success of these campaigns.
Solution:
Apart from using email marketing to increase sales, Baby Supermall uses search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. However, to increase sales from current customer, email marketing was seen as the perfect solution. With email marketing, Baby Supermall could promote other products to current customers in hopes of encouraging them to become repeat buyers.
Once Dave Suby, VP of IT at Baby Supermall, realized the need for a dedicated email marketing application, he did extensive research to find a suitable provider. Suby found Bronto as a great solution for their needs. “We decided to go with Bronto because they offer a robust solution at a reasonable price. We felt Bronto offered the right amount of tools for us to run a successful email campaign at the right price,” mentioned Suby. “We also found the application very simple to understand, and that there really wasn’t much of a learning curve,” states Suby. Within a matter of just a couple of hours, Dave was up and running with Bronto.
After learning the application, Suby addressed their email list management. “Typically 1/3 of our customers opt-in to receive emails from us. We also collect about 50 email address per week from potential customers who request personal pricing,” remarked Suby. With a growing list size, Baby Supermall immediately found value in using the API. With help from the API, Baby Supermall’s list was kept clean, and Bronto kept track of their customers’ preferences. Before the email addresses had to be manually uploaded, but now the API easily uploads the addresses. “We really relied on Bronto’s client services to help get our API up and running. Their help was invaluable and made my life a lot easier!” said Suby.
In addition to improved list management, Suby values the ability to run segments on their list as well as run overlay reports or view the send-by-send reports. Suby noted that, “Reporting gives me the ability to see how we are performing and if I need to make any changes.”
Remailing has become another tactic to increase sales for Baby Supermall. “We learned from our Bronto support team that remailing is a great way to increase sales and visibility,” says Suby. Emails are sent to their customers every 2-3 weeks, and then they resend to unopens one week later. For every remail they send, they change the subject line and vary the send time to increase the chance that the recipient will open the email.
Email marketing gives Baby Supermall the ability to promote baby bedding and also market other products such as baby cribs and baby travel accessories. Soon, Baby Supermall will move into selling apparel, giving them increased opportunities to offer specials, sales, and incentives. “Currently our organization is growing by leaps and bounds, email marketing provides us a cost efficient way to keep up with our market and continue to increase sales,” states Suby.
Results:
After fully implementing an email-marketing program, Baby Supermall saw immediate results.
Although measuring the ability to increase brand awareness is difficult, one way to look at these results is through email activity. On average Baby Supermall’s open rate is around 20% and their click to open rate is around 40%, signaling that they are gaining increased visibility with their customers and ideally increased mind share.
Using Bronto, Baby Supermall has achieved a spectacular 443% ROI. Through remailing they achieved a 150% increase in revenue, and on average their remails generate up to 50% of the revenue that was generated from the initial email.
“With the success that we have achieved through email marketing using Bronto, it’s a no brainer that this is a great solution to help increase sales and improve visibility. We are planning to continue to expand our mailing frequency and product offering,” remarked Suby.
“Bronto’s deliverability is awesome and the result has been a 30% increase in orders.”
Michael Chapin
President/COO,
From You Flowers
