Firms Use E-mail to Sell More Goods
May 28 -- In their weekly e-mail, half a million fans of Lands' End, the preppy cataloger that agreed in May to sell out to Sears, recently read about a man who wore his Lands' End mesh shirt to a preserve for orphaned chimpanzees in the Republic of Guinea.
Sales of the shirt rose 40 percent that week.
E-mails like this, with quirky tales and discounts, are one reason Lands' End sells more apparel online than any other retailer — $327 million last year, up 37 percent. It also is why Lands' End now does 21 percent of its $1.6 billion in revenue online.
Since Lands' End launched both the site and the newsletter in 1995, e-mail has become the cheapest way to buy online sales, far cheaper than the portal deals with AOL and MSN. "The newsletter is a relationship tool," says Bill M. Bass, a senior vice president.
Mail Campaigns Feature Games, Streams, Coupons
In the late-’90s frenzy over selling goods on the booming World Wide Web, thousands of companies threw up a shingle in cyberspace, only to get lost in the crowd. Now a better marketing tool is here — the old technology of e-mail.
In the U.S., 126 million people are now online, with 105 million e-mailing from home and 50 million sending e-mail from work, according to Forrester Research. The mail medium is maturing beyond basic alerts of airfare sales or notices of music releases from Amazon.
New campaigns feature videogames, coded coupons and streaming audio and video, as well as tracking e-mail forwarding.
Companies poured $927 million into e-mail marketing last year, up 87 percent from 2000, with two-thirds reporting increased overall sales from their e-mail efforts, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Last year e-mail generated 15 percent of online sales, up from 3 percent in 2000.
E-mail still has its warts, chiefly the preponderance of spam and the risk of spreading viruses. Lands' End still is in the unobtrusive minority, sending out e-mail newsletters only to customers who expressly agree to receive them.
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