Rebekah Monk and her husband Ian started their online business Bathrooms.com back in 2004 as something to keep Rebekah busy, having given up her job to have children.
Before long the business started to take off, they took on staff and Ian quit his job to become CEO. Now the company turns over some £5m a year, with that figure expected to double in the next 18 months.
Email marketing has become an essential part of Bathrooms.com’s sales strategy – I caught up with Ian to find out more.
Ian – tell me how the business started
Back in 2004 my wife Rebekah and I had just got married, she was a teacher I was running an IT business. Rebekah wanted to have kids and give up her job but we realised she might get bored so decided to set up a business that would keep her brain ticking over. We decided to start selling bespoke mirrors, importing them from the far east.
At that time Google AdWords had started and so we turned that on and very quickly started getting traffic. After a while we decided that mirrors wasn’t enough and we looked at some of the other tabs in a price sheet our wholesaler had sent us.
It was mainly bathroom products and the prices were phenomenal – showers were selling for £1,000 over here and we could buy them for £50 so we saw a real opportunity. I joined full time in 2005 and the business grew organically from there.
When did you start using email marketing?
We had been doing some email marketing since day one but we have really started to focus on it since the rebrand in April of this year. We have opened up what we are doing around targeting.
You can see a lot of ecommerce businesses out there gaining a lot of revenue from email marketing. Part of the rebrand was the objective of getting more email addresses and creating dialog with customers in a more proactive way.
We’ve not being sending emails too frequently, not more than once a week but we segment out addresses and create targeted emails.
Which email marketing service do you use?
We using dotMailer, it has has been okay but to be frank we got recommended it and we had a lot going on and the time so went with it. We want to go through a process soon to review what is out there – it’s not that we are unhappy we need to know what are options are.
What have the benefits been of using email marketing?
There three main areas where we feel the emails are important.
One is to do with cart abandonment. We are active on cart abandonment and with specially targeted emails we are able to close those “lost” transactions – which is important.
Reactivation is another important area. Bathrooms don’t tend to be something people buy every week but it might be something you look to refresh so we target customers who purchased six months, a year or two years ago and try to reactivate them through emails.
The other area is reminding people. Bathroom purchasing is a big consideration for people and a big percentage of the people that visit us won’t transact for three months or so after an initial visit as they do their research.
There are a lot of bathroom brands out there and it can be quite hard for customers to recall where they saw something and who you are. Having a dialogue with them to make sure that we are still a consideration is important. We’ve definitely seen this action pick up our conversions.
For us it is really important to create good content to engage our customers. We work with two well-known journalists who write in home magazines.
They write great quality features for us such as buyers guides and latest colour trends – by looking at what our customers are viewing we can send them relevant content which proves useful for them during the buying process. We don’t just bombard them with offers – if you want a long-term dialogue it is important to use content.
How important is email marketing in your overall strategy?
Overall it is fair to say we couldn’t live without without pay-per-click advertising but when it comes to bang for your buck, email kicks its butt.
However I think email is so hard to disentangle from everything else – these things like social media and SEO all work together. Google is probably even taking into account how many emails are opened – these things are all intertwining.
As an ecommerce business you need to be doing them all and doing them all well. Some (such as pay-per-click) will drive initial interest but without email we would have lower conversion rates. I think emails is best ROI.
Are there any lessons you have learned during your experience with email marketing?
Over the years one of the things that did hit us was our emails being filtered into spam. The email companies we were using stopped allowing us to use their service because they didn’t want to get blacklisted by people like Yahoo.
We weren’t doing anything particularly wrong, we were only sending to registered users but maybe our content wasn’t good enough. Segmentation has helped us to get around that.
Think about it – if you are in a buying cycle you are probably happy to receive emails once a week but after you have bought, you don’t want them. That is when we have to change the way we email them. It’s quite a lot of work.
What advice would you give a young ecommerce business in regards to email marketing?
Step one is to use a service provider – don’t try to send emails from your own server, you could end up blacklisted which can start effecting you other emails such as orders.
It is fundamental to segment, you have to give targeted information to your customers. The key performance indicators here are how many emails are getting opened and how many unsubscribes or spam notices you get.
Make sure you are doing content that is tailored – not ever the top but in some small way, Even just customers that have bought from you and those that haven’t.
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