Company: Blooms Today
Contact: John Morley, Executive Vice-President, Marketing
Location: Haymarket, Virginia
Industry: Retail, B2C
Annual revenue: Confidential
Number of employees: 65

Quick Read:

A floral delivery company, Blooms Today was a seasonal business. Business around Mother's Day and Valentine's Day was always booming—in fact, the company had just about as much business as it could handle around those two holidays—but it needed a way to drive sales during non-peak times.

The company, which considers itself to be in the relationship business, nevertheless had no email marketing strategy to improve relationships with customers. By creating an email strategy based on little-known "holidays," the company was able to spur gift-giving during the off-season.

A spike of as much as 10% in orders immediately followed email campaigns, with increased opens and clickthrough rates. The company also grew its email list more than 40% in just over a year.

Challenge:

"In our industry, there's a lot of opportunity, because almost everyone buys flowers. But they maybe buy them only 1.6 to 1.8 times a year," said John Morley, executive vice-president of marketing for Blooms Today.

While the company had as much as it could handle, logistically, during the days leading up to Mother's Day and Valentines Day, Morley knew he could increase the number of times people ordered flowers throughout the year if he could just hit on the right strategy.

Customizing an email campaign geared toward raising awareness of special days beyond those two holidays made sense, but the existing email strategy was "a bad scene," Morley said. "We made the mistake of doing it in-house. We got in trouble with spam filters, we were in non-compliance with CAN-SPAM—all those problems."

He decided to overhaul the company's email communication strategy.

Campaign:

Working with email provider Bronto, Morley completely restructured the email program, basing it on five simple tactics:

Tactic #1: Focus on nontraditional holidays

"If you see that Sept. 8 is Teacher's Day, and you got an email four days before Teacher's Day, you might think, 'My kids' teachers are really great. I want to acknowledge them,'" Morley explained.

He added, "There's Grandparents Day, Best Friends Day. It's amazing to see how many of these holidays there are."

Morley has a list of all the potential "holidays" and sends reminders several days in advance. The emails almost always include a promotion—anywhere from a 5% to a 15% discount.

Tactic #2: Change wording when offering email registration

Morley's team changed the wording on the registration page, from "Sign up for our newsletter" to "Sign up to be notified of special discount offers."

He also had representatives in the call center change what they asked consumers, from "Do you want to be on our mailing list?" to "Do you want to be notified of any special promotions?"