StoreRunner Case Study; Reflect.com's Traffic, Sales & Retention Secret

*** MarketingSherpa’s eMarketingtoHer.com ***
Practical News & Tips for Marketing to Online Women
October 12, 2000 - Vol. I, Issue 15

1. NEWS: Mighty Seven Networks, ThatLook.com,
WorkingWoman.com, Elle.com

2. More Headlines

3. CASE STUDY: StoreRunner's Instant-Win Campaign Generates 40
Million Pageviews from 3.5 Million Visitors

4. EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Hannalore Schmidt, Reflect.com's
Director of Consumer Delight & Loyalty, on Attracting and
Retaining Female Customers

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* Mighty Seven Networks Seeks Partnerships with Family and
"Quality" Game Sites Women Visit

Seeking an extra online revenue stream? The Mighty Seven
Networks just cut one of its top site partners a check for
$87,000 for the month of September alone, while more average
sites still get in excess of $10,000 a month. All you have to
do is allow the Networks to add opt-in offers for clients such
as Readers' Digest and Sony's Emazing.com to your regular
visitor or shopper registration page.

However, VP Client Development Tara Brennan told us "We have a
very rigid series of criteria a site needs to go meet before
being approved being approved for the network." These include
a high volume of new registrants; a system that contacts new
opt-in registrants within 24 hours or less ("Most sites take
3-4 days or in some cases a week"); and, having high-quality
advertisers ("I look at where Johnson & Johnson or Procter &
Gamble are spending their money to reach women.)

Mighty Seven Networks is currently seeking partnerships with
high volume "quality" family and game sites women visit.
Think you make the grade? Contact 212.925.7070 or go to
http://www.mightyseven.com

* ThatLook.com Eagerly Seeks Partnerships with Women's Sites
Cosmetics Firms and Cataloguers

This August ThatLook.com, a site which performs a marketing
and credit check function for Board certified plastic
surgeons, received a whopping $40 million in media barter
dollars through Sivla venture capital. (This means instead of
cash, the company gets an equally valued amount of television,
radio and other media.) Now CEO Gerard Powell wants to
leverage this windfall by "doing as much joint venture
marketing as we can do."

He's interested in "any type of strategic alliance I can put
together," including partnerships with cataloguers such as
Chadwicks or Newport News, cosmetics firms and other products
women planning or recovering from plastic surgery would be
interested in. ThatLook.com is in the midst of rolling out a
large offline campaign, including 4,800 national TV and 600
radio spots, as well as space ads in just about every women's
print magazine you can name from Cosmo and Glamour to the
National Enquirer.

Space ads results so far reveal that female magazine readers
are just as likely to visit a Web site as they are to dial a
toll-free number for more information. ThatLook.com's average
site visitor is 32 years old with a $40,000 income. Potential
partners should email Powell at gap@thatlook.com.
http://www.thatlook.com

* WorkingWoman.com Counts on its "Huge Offline Brand
Acceptance" to Succeed

The Queen is dead, long live the Queen! Just as
WomenConnect.com -- a site aimed at women in the workplace --
went under this Fall due to fundraising failure, Working Woman
magazine launched WorkingWoman.com. Executive VP of marketing
Licia Hahn says, "We don't consider ourselves in women's
space. The site is an extension for our network. We are not
in the woman's realm. It's about enabling women to be
competitive and successful and giving them the tools and
information they need to succeed."

So how does the site intend to be more successful? "We've
been around for 25 years and consumer wisdom is that having
success off-line significantly helps online. We had good will
and trust already in place," Hahn added.

In fact the only real challenge for Workingwoman was figuring
out how to drive its already large consumer base online. The
solution was easier than expected. Every year the magazine
"Working Mother", a product of the Working Women Network,
compiles a list of the 100 best companies. The issue created
a lot of attention and press, which in turn "created ripple
effect which fueled the site."

Also helping increase hits was the network itself. With so
many different aspects to their product, from their magazines
Working Woman and Working Mother to Nafe (National Association
of Female Executives) it was easier to transport customers
from offline to on. As Hahn explains, "We have a huge brand
acceptance." That plus the fact that CEO Kay Koplowitz is
well known in the financial world (she spearheaded Springboard
2000, an event bringing VCs and female entrepreneurs together)
makes all the difference in the world.
http://www.workingwoman.com

* Media Buy of the Week: Elle.com's Single Young Women with
Online Spending Power

A Young & Rubicam Intelligence Factory report produced this
July predicts that "liberated" single women will be a dominant
demographic in online sales of everything from travel to cars.
If you're looking for a site targeting single women with an
above-average salary, check out the media kit for Elle.com.

Elle.com gets 4.1 million page views per month and has 65,000
opt-in subscribers to its weekly email newsletter. 58% of
visitors are single women, over 70% of whom are 18-34 with an
average salary $41,300. Ads on the site or newsletter run 25-
30 CPM. More info, contact Phase2Media at 212.883.4700
http://www.phase2.com
http://www.elle.com

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EXCLUSIVE HEADLINES: More from MarketingSherpa.com
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* Office.com Beats Goals by Almost 300% with a Streaming Video
Email Campaign
http://www.marketingtosmallbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=969

* How the UK's DeskDemon.com Used Scantily-Clad Males to
Generate Press Interest
http://www.marketingsherpa.co.uk/sample.cfm?contentID=883

* Self-Published Book Grosses Over $750,000 in Sales Online
with a Great Affiliate Program
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=961

* How the Doubleclick & Netcreations Deal Affects Marketing
http://www.marketingtowebmarketers.com/sample.cfm?contentID=949
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CASE STUDY: StoreRunner
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* StoreRunner's Instant-Win Campaign Generates 40 Million
Pageviews from 3.5 Million Visitors

CHALLENGE
The StoreRunner, "The quickest way to your favorite
stores," site makes its money by getting consumers to browse
and purchase through it's collection of more than 500
retailers featuring 8,000 products from cereal to CD-ROMs. So
the site needed a way to get millions of new visitors,
demographically skewed toward female shoppers, to explore it
very deeply (aka lots of page views per visitor) ... and to
then get them to return again and again. They hired RealTIME
media, an agency specializing in online scratch-off cards and
related sweeps promotions. RealTIME's Senior Digital
Marketing Executive Jody Kaiser told us the details.

CAMPAIGN
First StoreRunner and RealTIME worked together to
create a series of campaigns to drive serious site traffic.
Offline the site ran billboards, bus ads and radio spots in
America's top Internet markets such as Washington DC (where
you couldn't miss them this Summer!) Online the site ran a
whole series of banner ads through Doubleclick, frequently
changing creative to optimize results. Kaiser says, "If a
banner was not performing, it was down in three seconds flat
and a new banner was put up." StoreRunner also did blast
emails to rented opt-in lists. Kaiser says, "When you went
from banners to the promotion or emails to the promotion, the
landing page art related to the banner or email they came
from. It's very important to have a correlation between what
they click on and where they go to."

In all cases the creative was bright and cheerful, often using
a similar theme, "Win a 4-Runner from StoreRunner!"

Visitors could register to be entered in a sweepstakes, and
were then directed to surf through the site collecting ten
pageviews to earn a virtual scratch-off game card. Plus, they
could get additional game cards by visiting the site daily.
Visitors could also refer friends to the site for additional
prizes. Kaiser notes, "We constructed the prize pool to be
family or women oriented. It included FTD bouquets, Owens
Mills family portraits, Mrs. Field's cookies, plus some Web
certificates which were as good as cash for online shopping."

RESULTS
The campaign generated 40 million pageviews, 3.5
million unique visitors and over 500,000 opt-in registrants.
15% of visitors used viral tools to tell their friends about
the promotion and 20% of these friends then visited the site
to register. 58.5% of visitors were women, most aged 25-34.

Banners that worked the best featured specific words like
"Win" or "Win Instantly".

After the campaign finished in August, StoreRunner hired
research firm Greenfield Online to run an online focus group
in order to find ways to make their next roll-out even more
successful. Based on results, StoreRunner has adjusted the
prize pool to include a laptop PC, trips to Orlando and a
Caribbean cruise. They've also changed the odds of winning
slightly from 1:22 to 1:15, "it's more enticing, " says
Kaiser, "Women just wanted to win, win anything. We got thank
you letters for phone cards! So even lower level prizes make
people happy." The games themselves have also been simplified
a bit, "there were too many things going on. Simplicity is
the key."

COST: StoreRunner spent about $6 million.

NOTES: One great online promotional idea (with a low price
tag) is to have your product, site or service featured as one
of the prizes in a campaign RealTIME media is running for a
client. RealTIME's Bonnie Liss-Wolf says, "We've had calls
from women's sites who want to give away online shopping
spees; spa getaways; phone time ... Maybelline just gave 4,000
lipsticks for a campaign. Visit Florida is a big partner."
Interested? Contact Liss-Wolf at 610.896.9400 x234.

We love the realistic "scratching" noise the scratch and win
cards make when you run your mouse over them. RealTIME Media
has a patent pending on this instant-win scratch technology,
so you have to call them to do a test campaign.

http://www.storerunner.com
http://www.realtimemedia.com
http://www.greenfield.com

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Hannalore Schmidt of Reflect.com
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Hannalore Schmidt of Reflect.com, an online beauty service
which lets women customize their own skincare, hair care,
cosmetics and fragrances, has title that's even more exotic
than her name: Director of Consumer Delight & Loyalty. After
chatting with her, we wanted to go online and become new
Reflect customers right away. We also suspect that many
ecommerce executives from other companies order Reflect
products simply to learn from their customer retention
techniques. Here's why:

Q: In these increasingly lean and mean times why did Reflect
feel it was necessary to have a "Director of Consumer Delight
and Loyalty"?

Schmidt: There's a paradigm at department store cosmetic
counters that you get a gift bag. It's these bonuses that
drive purchases. Our products are customized so we can't copy
that program. But we wanted to "delight her at every stage of
the process."

So, after she places her first order she gets two stems of
orchids. We work with ProFlowers to send them fresh cut from
the grower via two-day express along with a thank you note.
Women are so excited to get it -- it exceeds all their
expectations. We get a lot of word of mouth that way, it's
anecdotal, "I told everyone at the office."

We don't do the same level for every purchase after that, but
we always try to include some delightful extra -- a pretty
silver compact mirror, a t-shirt, a travel bag.

Q: I can see how that would delight customers, but what if
they don't like the customized product you've sold them?

Schmidt: You can't return customized products. So if she's
not delighted with say a lipstick, customer service tells her
to keep it and work with us to re-customize the product to
make it better for her. Most people would call that service
recovery. We tell customers, "we're not perfect and we're
still learning. If we make a mistake we have a program to
keep your business. Give us one more chance."

We send a very honest handwritten note saying, "I'm sorry you
had a bad experience." If we are out of an ingredient, we'll
also send you a couple of gift certificates to Starbucks. If
we really screw up in an unforgivable way, we'll send you a
full bouquet of flowers.

Q: Wow! Are you using in-house or out-sourced customer
service reps?

Schmidt: We use all internal. At first we used external, but
they couldn't really provide the "Nordstroms" level of service
we wanted. The women weren't as committed as we needed to be.
They wouldn't go the extra mile for the customer.

Now we have ten in-house providing service from 11-11 Eastern
time seven days a week. They are a very dedicated team. We
give them equity in the company. We had certain types of
people we wanted to hire: very, very personable and smart.
They are empowered to go ahead, make decisions and give
consumers something extra.

Q: Lucky customers! How do you drive traffic to the site so
women learn about you in the first place?

Schmidt: We don't look for a specific age demographic. Our
best target audience are women who have purchases online
already. There are a lot of women online but they aren't
necessarily comfortable purchasing there yet. We are testing
a program now putting offers on online order confirmation
pages at other sites where women shop, such as Garden.com.
They've made the leap and purchased and they have a credit
card in hand!

Q: Studies show women like email. What are you doing there
for acquisition?

Schmidt: We target lists where women have opted-in to a beauty
or fashion forum or shopped online. We use the same
principals for direct mail. We send personalized museum
quality cards taking the product images from our print
campaigns and putting the recipient's name on the bottles. So
it might say, "Erin's Shampoo". It includes a special offer
such as a gift certificate to get free conditioner when you
buy the shampoo.

We've tested a lot of branding, a lot of images. The biggest
thing we've found for email is you have to keep it short, to
the point and not too fluffy. "We're all about this, here's
why that's important to you and here's an offer." Very simple
and straight to the point.

We have monthly goals and we try to hit a lower acquisition
cost per customer every month.

We also send customized emails to current registrants to
strengthen relationships. They contain value-added types of
information. If she lives in New Orleans where it's humid and
has curly hair, we might send tips on how she can keep her
hair from frizzing.

Q: Have you done any offline marketing?

Schmidt: We've tested magazines. We started with beauty
magazines and arte now going broader. We've really evolved
creative. The first launch was focused on empowerment, the
higher order of benefits -- you can be creative, etc. Women
didn't really get it. The whole idea of customizing was hard
to grasp so it didn't work to jump to emotional benefits they
didn't understand.

Q: Shopping cart abandonment is a huge problem for most
ecommerce sites. How do you reduce it?

Schmidt: The biggest reason women abandon carts is that they
go through the process and they had a great time, but they're
not really sure who the company is and how the product will
work for her.

We added feedback throughout the shopping process that tells
her why the product is right for her. "You've told me you
have color treated hair and your hair tends to be frizzy,
so...." Every time she tells us something, we help her see
why the product just created is right for her.

We get her email address right at the beginning -- we say
before you create a Web site we need an identifier for you.
People are very worried about their privacy because we're
asking for such personal information; so, we have one of the
strongest privacy policies on the Web.

After she's abandoned her shopping cart, we communicate via
email. "Hey I noticed you left something, is there something
wrong? Can we help you fix it?" What really works is a
visual next to copy saying, "Name's Shampoo created on Date"
And we'll add an offer to try some conditioner with that.

Q: Are you interested in any partnerships?

Schmidt: We'd love to partner with companies that deal in
customization with a substantial number of women purchasing
online!

http://www.reflect.com

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