The context
Wealthy professional women with a passion for fashion - this is the target audience of clothes retailer Karen Millen. The fashion chain needed to match its prominent presence on the high street and in department stores with an effective online strategy, to ensure customers could also buy easily using the internet.
As part of this, Karen Millen were looking to develop a fully profiled database, use that data intelligently and drive traffic to their recently re-launched website, www.karenmillen.com
The challenge
The updated website had been designed to have better usability and enhanced functionality to improve customer conversions. To establish a dialogue with prospects and customers, Karen Millen needed to grow registrations to its newsletter and increase email contact with those contacts, which in turn would lead to improved traffic to the site.
The solution
ECircle was hired to help, a company not new to Karen Millen. The supplier already had a relationship with other brands within Karen Millen parent the Mosaic group, including Coast, Oasis, Principles, Shoe Studio and Warehouse.
"It was eCircle's ability to both generate new leads and broadcast campaigns which really first attracted us to them," says Emma Bott, ecommerce manager at Karen Millen.
Lead generation
To build up its database, Karen Millen rented lists to generate new subscribers to its newsletter with an offer to win a wardrobe worth £1,000. Users who opted in to receive the newsletter were taken to a fully branded landing page hosted by eCircle, and automatically added to its database within eCircle's email broadcast platform eC-messenger. A campaign promoting Karen Millen's sale and both campaigns produced results. "We were thrilled to generate over 8,000 new leads from these two campaigns alone," Bott says.
Database segmentation
Segmentation followed, based on people who subscribed to the newsletter at the point of purchase and people who signed up as a result of a competition. This identified people who were most responsive to discounting and this section of the database was targeted with further offer-based emails.
A pan-European approach
A campaign in advance of Christmas activity was planned, in order to generate 25,000 UK female subscribers, 10,000 French subscribers and 10,000 German subscribers. "We exceeded our target number of leads in just five days," Bott says.
The future
Next up, eCircle will integrate email with web analytics, allowing Karen Millen to track online and email behaviour as well as event trigger campaigns. There are plans too, to take advantage of eC-messenger's new survey builder tool.
Feature
Karen Millen's passion for fashion - and email
LONDON - You may be a very visible high street brand, but if you don't have a conversation with customers and prospects on the web, there's a vital piece of your marketing strategy missing, as Karen Millen discovered.