Chella Professional Skincare began selling its anti-aging solution over the Web in December 2003, about three months after the company itself was founded. And for the most part, operations were a thing of beauty. Customers were able either to order one set of the Chella Complex skincare products or to enroll in a $40 free trial/ autoship program that let them test it, then sent more every month until they asked to cancel. Primarily by promoting its site through affiliate networks, Chella was able finally to turn a profit in January 2005. But there was one blemish on that picture: Chella had virtually no ability to relate to its customers through e-mail.
“When you’re doing Internet sales, you need to communicate with your customers and build community through e-mail and newsletters,” says Chella president Chris Kolodziejski. But his is a small company of 10 full-time employees and outsources almost all of its back-office “pick, pack ship and fulfill” functions. “We just didn’t have the time, money or expertise to institute our own e-mail program.” So while consumers would get auto-response e-mails upon buying Chella’s products online or shipping notices from the fulfillment house, the company wasn’t doing anything to integrate those communications into the sales channel. Without a coordinated e-mail effort, Chella was also losing out an opportunity for contact with customers who started an order form but did not complete it.
Those wrinkles were smoothed out with a little research into the capabilities of outsourced e-mail services. Kolodziejski finally settled on the StormPost solution from SkyList That platform, he says, has allowed Chella to add e-mail to the marketing channels it can employ to reach current customers, non-customers who have abandoned their carts, and free-trial users who have signed up for a sample of Chella’s skin products and may need encouragement to enter into the standard monthly delivery pipeline.
The primary benefit of an outsourced e-mail platform, says Kolodziejski, is the amount of time his company saves by building its mail lists automatically. “We can set up little scripts that automatically feed that e-mail data into the SkyList solution every time we get a new customer, or every time a customer fails to hit the ‘submit’ button on their order,” he says. That’s much faster and simpler than building the same lists by scraping contact data off fulfillment records, even if Chella had a data system to accept them.
“We’re getting ready to send our first monthly e-mail newsletter to drive interesting content, value and offers to customers,” he says. “That wouldn’t have been possible on our own, let alone any more sophisticated things we’re doing with e-mail. We couldn’t have built this infrastructure on our own—we didn’t have the time or the know-how.”
One customer group Chella can now reach is those who fill out the the company’s online order form—including providing an e-mail address and permission- but don’t complete the purchase. “This could happen for a number of reasons,” Kolodziejski says. “Maybe they changed their mind, but perhaps the doorbell rang, or the phone. In any case, we wanted to find out how many of these abandons were lost interest, and how many were for other causes.” Chella groups those abandoner addresses separately. When a customer who has registered and given e-mail permission walks away from a cart, trigger functions within the SkyList platform send them a communication within days offering a one-time 20% discount if they buy via a link in that e-mail.
Kolodziejski says that first come-back-to-Chella e-mail gets a hefty open rate of about 37% and an unsubscribe rate of only 1%. “That means that 99 out of every 100 people don’t object that they didn’t buy from us, but still got an e-mail from us,” he says. “I find that very interesting.”
If the abandoners don’t respond to that first special offer, Chella’s e-mail moves into serial mailing mode and sends them periodic information on its five products, one every three days, and always with the option to unsubscribe. For each of those serial e-mails as well, unsubscribe rates are below 1%. However, open typically rates drop over the serial campaign, from 22% for the first e-mail down to 8% on the last of the five.
Still, the low unsubscribe rate is enough to convince Kolodziejski that Chella is speaking here to some valuable pre-disposed future buyers. The serial e-mails to non-customers are heavy on informational content, each one describing the workings and benefits of a specific product: skin creams for morning and evening, for the skin around the eyes, a skin-firming serum and an exfoliant.
“That tells us that they must really like what they’re getting in this series, given the high opens and the low unsubscribes,” he says. Those are relationships that Chella wants to preserve and foster in the hope that those customers will return to the Web site, with the right incentive, and start buying. Kolodziejski won’t talk specifically about the subject line used to get these serial e-mails opened. But he will say that it’s personalized with the recipient’s first name and uses “chella.com” in the domain, so that the sender can clearly be identified.
As for staying top of mind with existing customers, he says Chella will rely primarily on the forthcoming e-mail newsletter. “It was very frustrating to me for the first year of business because we didn’t have the capital or resources to put a real quality newsletter in place. But when our first issue comes out, I think they’re going to be glad we waited, because it will provide real value.” Besides good-looking content in HTML format, the Chella newsletter will contain exclusive special offers for readers.
“One thing I think you have to do with a newsletter is to give readers a reason to stay subscribed,” Kolodziejski says.
The company has tested several channels for driving new customers to its Web site, including search engine marketing. But Kolodziejski says buying keywords was not as productive as he hoped, and he has neither the budget to overlook click fraud nor the time to monitor for it. So Chella will stay primarily with affiliate marketing as a source of new buyers. It also recently began offering Chella Complex in high-end salons and dermatology offices in the western states.
But for keeping contact with existing customers and reactivating those who almost bought but didn’t, he says, e-mail is the medium of choice.
