Custom Wild Mail Drives Store Traffic

Upscale health food chain Wild Oats is using dynamic content in its national e-mail newsletter to boost attendance at events in local stores, and the program reportedly is working like gangbusters.

The retailer’s 75 U.S. store locations typically hold from one to four special events each week, such as wine tastings and classes.

“These events are so varied by the different stores that creating a printed piece for each one is simply out of the question because of the budget and time involved,” says Annie Angelo, Wild Oats’ manager of online marketing.

However, with dynamic content, the retailer is tailoring its national e-mail newsletter to the store nearest each subscriber.

“When someone signs up for [Wild Oats’ newsletter] Wild Mail, they tell us what store they shop at, so that’s tied to their profile,” she says. “So if the store in Princeton, NJ is having an event, we can send that information in the regular e-mail as dynamic content to just the Princeton subscribers.”

For example, when Wild Oats’ Omaha, NE location failed to get people to sign up for a wine tasting through in-store promotions, the company touted the event to Wild Mail subscribers that live nearby. The next day, Angelo says, 50 people signed up for the event. “That was the first one that showed us this really could drive a lot of traffic,” she adds.

To date the company has collected e-mail addresses mainly at its Web site (www.wildoats.com), but having seen the success of dynamic content, local event managers are gathering these addresses as well.

Emelie Ortiz, Wild Oats’ marketing manager for the East region, says that every time a wine-and-cheese tasting is offered at the Nashville, TN store, attendance jumps from 30% to 75%.

“Our marketing managers in each store are pretty new to adding specific event details into Wild Mail e-mails, but they’ve become more consistent at using this as a way of communicating our in-store marketing events,” Ortiz says. As a result, “our customers have come to rely on their Wild Mail to find out what’s happening.”

Using e-mail software from ExactTarget, Wild Oats’ online marketing team creates a newsletter with content suitable for its subscribers nationwide.

Each newsletter contains a dynamic content box into which ExactTarget’s software inserts event listings according to the store location in the subscriber’s profile, or generic content aimed at those who either have no store tied to their profile or whose targeted store doesn’t have an event to promote.

Wild Oats has sent as few as eight versions of its newsletter and as many as 70.

So far, Wild Oats has tailored its dynamic content solely to geographic areas. However, Angelo says she also plans to target subscribers’ food preferences. “We have a lot of information on people’s unique dietary restrictions, so we can tailor their e-mail the same way with a dynamically driven recipe. We haven’t done it yet, but that’s on the radar for ’07.”

To sign up for Wild Oats’ newsletter, subscribers need only supply their e-mail address and hit “submit.” However, the form contains questions that attempt to discern a subscriber’s interests. For example, one asks subs to check all their food preferences and offers 11 categories, such as vegan, gluten/wheat-free, organic and diabetic.

Another asks them to check boxes that coincide with their recipe preferences — for instance, “easy to make,” “American favorites,” “holiday fare” and “special diets.”

“Most people look at it and say, ‘Your survey is much too long,’ but it works for us,” Angelo says.

WN

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E-mailers Lack Data

Though Wild Oats apparently has little trouble getting e-mail newsletter subscribers to answer questions about themselves when they register, the vast majority of e-mail marketers aren’t so lucky.

Thirty-four percent of 422 such marketers recently polled by JupiterResearch for e-mail service provider Silverpop said the No. 1 challenge they face is a lack of customer data.

Ironically, e-mail marketing’s permission aspect probably is a big reason why this information is so scarce.

“The point of opt-in is a delicate time in the relationship between sender and recipient. It’s easy to scare off a potential subscriber with a long laundry list of questions about their habits and personal information,” says Elaine O’Gorman, Silverpop’s vice president for strategy. “Most sophisticated marketers test their opt-in forms religiously to maximize this balance, and we’ve seen opt-in rates literally double by, for instance, eliminating a single question in a form.”

She says direct marketers are turning to alternative data-collection methods after getting people to opt in to e-mail programs. “We’re seeing a lot more use of surveys to help fill in sparsely populated data fields.”

O’Gorman adds that the complaint she hears most often from DMers about their e-mail programs is that they can’t match their e-mail data with other information sources in their own company. This often is due to an absence of management information systems needed for such a project, or a common element in the data.

She says that except for firms with an extremely strong background in traditional marketing, most don’t use third-party data sources to augment e-mail addresses. “There seems to be a feeling that e-mail data is different in some way from direct mail data, whether it’s because direct mail tends in many cases to be household-based or because e-mail marketers simply aren’t familiar or comfortable with the data-matching services out there.”
— KM