As befits a company named Paula’s Choice, the online-only retailer of skincare and cosmetics offers e-mail subscribers plenty of options. They can receive an educational e-newsletter that’s heavy on scientific research and light on promotions either once a week or twice a month; impartial reviews of new beauty products from a broad array of brands, not just Paula’s Choice, twice a month; special offers on Paula’s Choice items weekly; and weekly notifications of personal and media appearances by company founder and skincare guru Paula Begoun.
Because so many of the newsletters emphasize research and reviews of competing products, it’s not surprising that e-mails that generate a lot of traffic—say, a report on the best skincare products available in drugstores—don’t necessarily generate the most sales.
Even so, in less than two years Paula’s Choice has more than doubled its e-mail-generated revenue. “Our e-mail revenue went from about 18% of our total site revenue to 30% and even more than 40%,” says senior director of marketing Cynthia Short.
Short gives much of the credit to the company’s August 2008 implementation of the Lyris HQ e-mail marketing solution. For one thing, the hosted solution enabled Paula’s Choice to get a handle on deliverability issues. “Essentially we were able to clean up our database,” Short says. “We had no idea before of what was being delivered and what wasn’t being delivered.”
Once the company began tracking and analyzing its deliverability, it was able to shed faulty addresses and improve relations with the various ISPs. Today it boasts of a deliverability rate of up to 98%. Its current e-mail database consists of about 200,000 addresses, up from 150,000 a year ago and about twice the size of the company’s customer file.
Then, too, the software made testing more feasible. “We used to spend a lot of time deciding what subject line to use,” Short recalls, “and without the ability to test, that was a big issue.” Now, thanks partly to regular testing, Paula’s Choice has seen open rates rise to as high as 50% for some campaigns and click-through rates averaging 10%-20%.
What’s more, the segmentation tools have enabled increased targeting of messages. When the company is about to launch a product, for instance, it will pull from its database the records of all customers who had used similar products so that it can send them an alert. If the company has excess inventory of specific items, it will select past buyers of those products to receive special offers. And when Begoun makes personal appearances to promote her books and product lines, Paula’s Choice will send e-mail reminders to those who live within a specific distance from where Begoun will be speaking.
And even some of the educational e-mails, such as the annual report on the best antiaging ingredients and the products from the myriad brands that contain them, reap not only traffic but also “a huge amount of revenue,” Short says. The impartiality of the information and the wealth of research cited help to burnish the authority and credibility of both Begoun and Paula’s Choice.
Even so, Paula’s Choice is working to further improve its e-newsletters, with a view to making the articles shorter and more easily scannable, Short says. “The first step is a survey of e-mail customers to see what features of our e-mails they want us to keep and what they don’t look at,” she explains. Then, because what people say and how they actually behave often differ, “we’ll compare that with the statistics from Lyris.”
