The History Channel's e-commerce Web site carries 16 video or DVD sets featuring German air might. By any standard this is a lot of Luftwaffe, but A&E Television Network's new CRM initiatives should keep the Huns flying on the television sets of history buffs for a long time.
Direct-to-consumer sales make up between 25% and 30% of A&E's product sales, with the rest generated through retail channels. As for its direct sales, 75% come from e-mail or one of the company's three merchandise Web sites — ShopAandE.com, ShopBiography.com and ShopHistoryChannel.com.
“We don't have a $2 million CRM tool,” says So Young Park, A&E's director of e-commerce. “I have been working on a CRM strategy, but spending several million dollars is not part of it. I want to work out the business value first.”
What Park does use is ATG Scenario Personalization, a tool from Art Technology Group Inc. of Cambridge, MA. The ATG software allows A&E to push tailored content based on category-interest data collected from site visitors — including information about the shows they view and results of a survey each completes when enrolling in a site's membership program. A&E's registered-member level is now in the mid-six figures, according to Park.
ATG's software also helped Park create triggered e-mailings that carry targeted offers to members who haven't visited the sites recently. The first of these went out in late March.
Separately, A&E made several cosmetic changes to its sites, such as moving away from large graphics (“People saw them and thought they were an ad,” Park says) or adding navigation features that allow visitors to shop by title or interest right on the landing page, rather than hiding these options in drop-down menus.
Since changing the Web sites and incorporating customized offers into its e-mails, A&E's visit-to-order conversion rate has risen by 25% on an average day. Conversions can run at around 50% when the company touts an especially hot title.
A&E's targeted e-mail program has seen similar increases. Order conversion from a focused e-mail blast ranges between 10% and 15%. The regular A&E store newsletters usually top out between 6% and 8%.
For now, A&E's three online stores rely on recency, frequency and monetary data, as well as the site-based interest information, for their CRM campaigns. While she won't rule it out completely, Park isn't jumping at the chance to overlay demographic data on her house file, although she might be inclined to add psychographic information.
