Plow & Hearth: Shopper Identification is Key to Success
Challenge
Plow & Hearth, a brand that offers unique, high-quality products for the home, yard, and garden, prides itself on delivering a seamless, multi-channel customer experience, and offers a variety of options for customers to engage. With its catalog, retail locations, and website, Plow & Hearth was struggling with the ability to identify new visitors to its site and to re-engage customers who were no longer responding to its daily email marketing campaigns. Hoping to improve its current state of affairs and recapture missed opportunities, the company turned to Merkle for its identification and personalization expertise, Merkury.
Approach
Plow & Hearth wanted to connect with customers no matter where they were in their customer journey, and worked with Merkle to create a program that used a welcome lightbox to help acquire new email addresses. Their program also consisted of triggered cart and browse emails to engage customers who were actively perusing the Plow & Hearth website. Merkury's proprietary Shopping Elsewhere™ email trigger was implemented to re-engage customers who were starting to lose touch with the brand.
Plow & Hearth provided a target universe of at-risk customers and also applied the Shopping Elsewhere™ proprietary logic to send emails to these customers when they were active online. Not only was the email delivered at the right time, the email also contained a tailored offer to grab their attention.
Merkury's ability to harness and interpret data enabled Plow & Hearth to take engagement to the next level. With its advanced website visitor identification capabilities, Merkury has linked more website visits to people, enabling the capture of person-based data. This allows the client to interact with shoppers in a meaningful way.
Results
increase of customers who received the Shopping Elsewhere™ email trigger
increase in email sign ups
increase in orders for new sign ups
open rate for unengaged customers
Keys to success
- Leveraging Merkury's Consumer Insights Interaction Hub™ to identify customers and improve engagement in real-time.
- Adding persistent engagement bars to the welcome acquisition lightboxes to increase the number of new email addresses acquired.
- Leveraging proprietary techniques that link more customers via email to data and attributes to further enhance targeting and modeling capabilities.
- Merkury's Send-Time Perfection™ with Shopping Elsewhere™ email trigger sent emails with personalized offers in real-time, reaching consumers in shopping mode, drastically increasing open rates and getting the shopper re-engaged.