When multichannel women’s and girls’ apparel retailer Title Nine launched an e-mail marketing campaign last Sunday for its new summer line including dresses, shorts and swimsuits, it used a single marketing application from Responsys Inc. to simultaneously post the same marketing material on Facebook.
Title Nine, which takes its name from a 1970s’ federal law that requires equal school funding of sports for women and men, has a loyal customer base of shoppers, the retailer says. But its early attempts to leverage new social media outlets to build on that base were unfocused and ineffective, says Jennifer McClelland, Title Nine’s e-commerce marketing manager.
The ability to coordinate e-mail and social media marketing campaigns, she adds, is crucial to the retailer’s goal of finding and engaging more consumers.
Title Nine, which operates its e-commerce site on the MarketLive platform, started using the new Responsys Interact Campaign for Social Networks marketing management application last week. The application, which Responsys delivers in a software-as-a-service environment, provides a single administrative interface for creating marketing content and for distributing that content through the Responsys e-mail management systems and to the Facebook and Twitter social networks.
Once marketing content is created for an e-mail campaign, it takes about 30 seconds to send the same content to Facebook or Twitter in a form that suits their online formats, a spokesman for Responsys says.
McClelland says that the same person on her staff who managed the e-mail marketing campaign also handled the Facebook campaign. On Monday, the day after those campaigns launched, Title Nine was able to pull reports from analytics built into the Responsys systems to see how consumers responded.
Although she couldn’t comment on specifics related to sales or conversion rates, McClelland says the results were encouraging. It confirmed that social media along with e-mail is effective, and we’d like to grow social media as a customer acquisition and sales channel.