This past week I joined a panel of retail experts at the ExactTarget Connections ’09: Success is By Design and spoke on behalf of our mutual customer Motorcycles USA (MUSA), ranked #223 in the Internet Retailer’s Top 500. They’re a pure-play ecommerce business selling motorcycle gear, apparel and accessories here in Oregon.  In order to successfully continue to grow their revenue year over year during a down market in the motorcycle industry and our overall tough economic conditions, MUSA has focused on dedicated customer relationship management, including exclusive promotions and highly focused email campaigns which is their leading customer touch point. As a customer of both Webtrends Analytics and ExactTarget SBS, MUSA was eager to produce highly targeted product recommendations for specific website visitor segments.

MUSA’s initial work focused on scrubbing their list and doing a lot of A/B Testing. Using ExactTarget’s deliverability and email open rate reporting, together with Webtrends’ conversion reporting, they saw double the open rates and triple the click-through rates.

To take another step forward in the evolution of this behavioral retargeting initiative, customer project sponsor Erick Barney, VP of Marketing, worked closely with both Webtrends and partner ExactTarget as well as solutions integrator ACR Analytics to integrate ExactTarget and Webtrends Analytics.  MUSA studied detailed email subscriber click behavior via ExactTarget and onsite conversion behavior using Webtrends’ campaign and conversion reporting.

Recent behavorial retargeting campaigns focused on segmenting the subscriber list by products viewed during website visits, and products that were placed into the shopping process but abandoned. Using that datastream, customer segments received dynamically generated relevant offers in a special “Your Picks” section. Conversion rates were greatly improved – for example, within the group that received offers on products they’d abandoned – the email conversion rate over doubled the normal rate. Additional significant improvements were seen by looking at the merchandising space effectiveness. These two statistics are relevant to email marketers in all types of businesses, not strictly ecommerce companies. And what’s great is this was done with Webtrends Analytics and ExactTarget – products that MUSA was already running. Additional products were not required like some other marketplace analytics solutions would.

MUSA will continue to maximize their use of email and analytics via the Webtrends-ExactTarget integration to drive three levels of retargeting: static remarketing emails based on website visitor data, dynamic remarketing campaigns with varied offers by visitor, and at the deepest level, move to 1:1 product merchandising efforts such as this one based on interest, shopping behavior and related recommendations. For this third category, leveraging Webtrends Warehouse and integrating yet a third datastream of CRM information together with website activity and campaign response data, other segmentation options can be taken into consideration such as products owned and geography.

Learn more about behavioral retargeting for email and banner campaigns on our Open Exchange site. Do you have a story, question or comment? Please let us know!

Tags: exacttarget MUSA behavorial retargeting intergration

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Events, Open Exchange, Partners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.