Perricone MD finds the beauty of the iPost Customer Engagement Program

"We wanted to use email marketing to reengage customers who had gone silent — the most cost effective way to grow sales in a recession. The iPost Customer Engagement Program enabled us to easily and profitably re-connect with these customers." — Neil Kjeldsen, vice president of eCommerce, Perricone MD
 
Perricone MD
Perricone MD is a leader in prestige skincare and was founded by Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a dermatologist, award-winning author, and anti-aging expert. The company primarily sells products online, on QVC, and in retail outlets. In late 2008, a new management team was brought in to invigorate the Perricone MD brand.
 

Challenge: Invigorate the Perricone MD brand and increase revenue 

Many customers on Perricone MD’s email list were no longer engaged or purchasing. When Perricone MD emailed their entire email list, they experienced delivery problems as unengaged customers drove up opt-out rates and spam complaints. Perricone MD needed a system to:

  1. Identify engaged customers that welcomed frequent email updates
  2. Reconnect with dormant customers without impacting overall delivery

Solution: The iPost Customer Engagement Program 
Neil Kjeldsen, vice president of eCommerce at Perricone MD, began working with iPost™ in late-2008. First, iPost® worked with Perricone MD to analyze their email, web analytics, and purchase data. iPost, also, helped Perricone MD refine its web analytics strategy, more fully implement Google Analytics, and trained Perricone MD staff on using Google Analytics data.

Perricone MD then implemented iPost’s Autotarget™, which automates and updates daily Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value (RFM) segmentation for online marketers. RFM has long been viewed by the offline marketing industry as a highly reliable predictor of future customer engagement.

Using Autotarget to automatically group customers into micro-segments, Perricone MD could divide customers into engaged and unengaged segments and perform outreach to each group accordingly.

Perricone MD began email marketing more often to engaged customers. Next, Kjeldsen focused on the unengaged customer segment Then Perricone MD and iPost developed a “trial size” offer program to entice these customers.

Timeframe: Big return in the 1st month 
In one month, Perricone MD was able to implement and optimize their engagement programs. Because Autotarget automatically updates segments customer data daily, Kjeldsen and his team found that Autotarget took only five minutes to use each mailing.

Results: Dramatic increase in revenue and interaction from unengaged customers without delivery risks.
Prior to segmenting by engagement, Perricone MD generated virtually no revenue from unengaged customers. Segmentation by engagement and targeted marketing generated revenue from inactive customers and was an important source of profitability during a recession. Perricone MD was also able to profitably increase email volume to engaged customers without hurting email deliverability.

Kjeldsen found that, if an unengaged customer clicked on a Perricone MD email, the newly engaged customer was likely to spend significant time on the Website and purchase products.

iPost’s Customer Engagement Program paid for itself in the first 3 days and continues to yield an increasingly stunning Return-on-Investment (ROI).