When it comes to email marketing, Coldwater Creek leaves nothing to chance. The company has a productive and effective online sales channel and email is integral to its success. As part of its integrated marketing initiative, Coldwater Creek sends two emails to its customers each week. While the company was fairly happy with the response rates and corresponding revenues achieved by their email campaigns, the marketing team was curious how much of its email was actually being delivered. After speaking with email deliverability experts at Return Path, Christine Laczai, Vice President of eCommerce, and her team discovered there was room for improvement.
“We didn’t know how much of our emails were reaching the inbox, but we were fairly confident that we had better than average success rates,” said Laczai. “We wanted to find out if there were ways to maximize our email delivery rates because in our business that can really impact our bottom line.
After consulting with Return Path, Coldwater Creek was surprised to learn that only 70 to 80 percent of its emails were actually reaching its customers’ inboxes. While Laczai and her team thought they had established solid relationship with the major ISPs and were following the appropriate guidelines, they discovered a large portion of their email messages were never reaching their consumers’ inboxes. With 20-30 percent of their email turning up missing or being delivered to a customer’s bulk folder, Laczai immediately realized that while her team thought conversion and revenue metrics were strong, they were leaving money on the table with every single email campaign.
“We see a direct correlation with our online sales and email campaigns,” said Laczai. “If 30 percent isn’t getting delivered, we could see a 30 percent variance in revenue.”
Looking to increase its email deliverability rates and to grow its sales margins, Coldwater Creek selected Return Path’s Platinum program. Almost immediately after engaging Return Path, Coldwater Creek has seen its inbox delivery percentage increase dramatically to an average of 98 percent.
Today, Return Path also monitors all Coldwater Creek campaigns and works with the company and several ISPs to resolve any issues that occur. Because Return Path is focusing on all the delivery management aspects of Coldwater Creek’s program, the company’s eCommerce team now has time to focus on other, high-level email marketing issues. Laczai believes that with less time needed to monitor their email delivery process, the team can now focus its efforts on strengthening their email campaigns, expanding customer email lists and increasing the company’s sales.
“With Return Path monitoring and fixing our email delivery issues, we can now work on marketing to our customers most effectively, without worrying about all the technical hassles,” Laczai said. In addition, with Return Path’s new, accurate deliverability metrics the Coldwater Creek marketing team now has the opportunity to re-assess the effectiveness of its email campaigns. With more accurate data available about the number of customers actually receiving Coldwater Creek emails, the marketing department now has more insight into how customers respond to various email marketing campaigns.
Even though email delivery rates have stabilized for Coldwater Creek, the company continues to depend on Return Path to keep its email marketing program strong and an effective component of its overall marketing strategy. “Things change in this space every day and the Return Path team always knows what questions to ask, and what we have to do to stay ahead of things,” Laczai said. “It would be stressful for us to keep up on all of this on our own, and we probably wouldn’t have the visibility into a lot of industry happenings that their team does.”
Coldwater Creek uses a custom-built email system to send their emails to customers. Before selecting Return Path’s solutions, Laczai and the executive team did investigate multiple Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Email Service Providers (ESPs). However, after researching their delivery monitoring and management capabilities, Coldwater Creek determined Return Path offered a more comprehensive and robust solution. Ultimately, the Coldwater Creek executive team determined that Return Path would give them a stronger competitive advantage because of their ability to quickly and cost effectively identify and solve the email problems that hinder email delivery and response rates. “The bottom line is that in our experience we’ve found ESPs take too long to get back to you – it might be days before you get answers with a delivery issue,” said Laczai. “With Return Path, I get an answer within a couple hours. I might not always like the answer, but the responsiveness means everything. It’s been beautiful. Any company using Return Path definitely has a competitive advantage.”
Privacy | Copyright 2010 Return Path, Inc.
