Challenge

Offering luxurious bedding and accessories online and at exclusive high-end retailers, Annie Selke needed a way to gain visibility and grow its business while maintaining the look and feel of the company’s exclusive brand. To achieve these goals, Annie Selke was running marketing campaigns through its existing email service provider (ESP), Bronto.

However, the campaigns weren’t as effective as Annie Selke hoped, leading the company to question both the reach and effectiveness of its lightboxes and cart abandonment programs. “Annie Selke is a visionary brand, but our digital marketing efforts weren’t meeting our standards,” says Kaylie Bruno, email-marketing specialist at Annie Selke. “We were beginning to question the value of our existing campaigns, wondering if we could reach more of the kind of customers we wanted to attract.”

Services
Data & Identity

Industry
Retail & Consumer Goods

Market
United States

Approach

To put suspicions to rest, Annie Selke tested Bronto’s cart abandonment triggered email program against Merkury’s program, which uses proprietary web visitor identification technology and advanced analytics to identify previously unidentifiable customers.

In addition, Merkury’s proprietary Send-Time Perfection™ with Shopping Elsewhere Triggers™ email technology enabled Annie Selke to engage offsite customers at the exact moment they were shopping.

“After testing the two cart abandonment programs against each other, it was clear that we would target more contacts and bring in more revenue” says Bruno. “The test was such a success that we decided to try triggered lightboxes.” One reason was to free up Annie Selke’s internal IT team, which was often burdened with the need to do additional last-minute coding in order to ensure lightboxes displayed correctly via Bronto. With Merkury, all we did was provide the creative file. Our IT staff was thrilled, and the ads went off without a hitch.”

From initiating new relationships to reengaging customers who are less active, Merkury's triggered lightbox service sent highly segmented, highly personalized messages to new and existing customers while they shopped.

Believing that direct mail can be a powerful component of a multichannel marketing strategy needed to survive and thrive in today’s retail environment, Annie Selke began cataloging in the fall. By coupling direct mail and digital marketing, Annie Selke ensured its message reached the right contacts via as many channels as possible providing a unified, supportive and personalized shopping experience.

“Our lightboxes remind potential customers to use the coupon code on the back of their catalog,” says Bruno. “We’re strengthening our communication with prospects by connecting offline and digital.” That not only means a better consumer experience, it also means more sales.

Keys to success

• Because of Merkury’s ease of integration with Bronto, Annie Selke was able to boost its current programs with real-time send capabilities without losing visibility into reporting capabilities on the current platform.
• Using triggered lightboxes powered by the proprietary Merkury Consumer Insight & Interaction Hub™, Annie Selke is now able to continuously optimize customers’ digital interactions and purchasing activity.