The Bombay Co. is using an integrated direct marketing campaign to not only increase customer traffic at its brick and mortar stores, but to show the public that it offers more than dark cherry wood furniture.
“We’ve got some fun new things that we’re doing through our Sunday newspaper ads and our catalogs to show the various sides of what Bombay is now in terms of a home decorating company,” said Matt Corey, vice president of E-commerce for The Bombay Co., at eTail 2004 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
Furthermore, the company is leveraging e-mail to drive people into the stores, he said. But before the company could do that, it had to learn how to crawl before it could walk.
In April 2002, The Bombay Co. had approximately 20,000 registered e-mail customers. Today, the company has nearly 630,000 people signed up to receive e-mail messages, Corey said.
And how does a company grow its e-mail list by more than half a million in less than two years? Not by renting outside lists, according to Corey. The Bombay Co. did it by marketing the special programs and benefits of being on the mailing list to customers, and by encouraging store personnel to get people to sign up – which sometimes involved incentive programs for the employees.
With this rapidly growing following online, company officials felt it important to explain to store managers that the purpose of the online presence was not to cannibalize the business of the retail sites.
“We have built confidence in our stores. We tell them, ‘If two or three people out of one hundred people buy online, we’re doing pretty good. The other 97 or 98 are coming to our Web site to research then go into your store.’ When you start to reinforce this with store managers, they start to get it,” Corey said.
“We want to make sure we never compete against our brick and mortar stores,” Corey said. “The Internet, while it certainly drives direct sales, is a marketing channel.”
Once a company has built up its e-mail list, it becomes extremely helpful to have the ability to track the performance of a multi-channel campaign. The Bombay Co. does this with bar codes on coupons available in e-mail, on the Web site and on direct mailers.
“The code is entered into our [point-of-sale] system and as soon as the event ends, we can track it. So whether it is a post card that has a code, an e-mail that has a code, or a page from our Web site, the Monday after a four day sale, we crank out the report and we can see what happened,” Corey said.
Although the company has an e-mail list with more than 600,000 addresses – and a recent e-mail campaign that generated more than $1 million in sales in three days under its belt, Corey and company understand they still have a ways to go.
“Where do we take e-mail? We don’t have a sophisticated personalized e-mail process. We’ll get there. We have to get much more focused personalization and reporting,” Corey said.
“For now it has been pretty basic…grow your database, make sure you have the right content for people at the right time and continue to focus on building your database and your customer base,” he said.
