RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

Right Start Leverages Rightnow®’S Point-And-Click Marketing To Deliver The Right Message To The Right Customer At The Right Time

Goals

• Grow online and brick-and-mortar channels
• Ensure relevance of marketing communications to every recipient
• Streamline and automate campaign design, execution and management

Achievements

• 100% growth of online channel; 20% growth of bricks-and-mortar channel
• 0.1% opt-out rates
• Sophisticated campaign operations managed by single individual

It’s not easy to support multiple retail channels with effective marketing. To drive traffic to bricks-and-mortar stores, you have to create localized campaigns and implement site-specific promotions. Web retailing, on the other hand, lends itself to national campaigns that are segmented according to other demographic criteria and/or customer behaviors. And direct mail catalogs tend to be even more broad-based.

The challenge gets even tougher when you’re selling products for infants and young children. Kids don’t stay little forever, so you have to be quick about finding your targets and hitting them. They also change quickly as they go from babies to toddlers—making it a constant challenge to match specific promotional offers with targeted customer lists.

Leading juvenile products marketer Right Start is successfully meeting all these challenges by harnessing the point-and-click campaign design, execution, and management power of RightNow and its hosted crm solution. The company is doing such a good job of targeting communications to its customers that only 0.1 percent of recipients opt out of any mailing. And the campaigns are clearly working because in-store sales have grown 20 percent year-to-year and online sales volume has doubled.

Even more remarkably, Right Start’s senior vice president of marketing and development Hope Neiman has been able to execute these highly effective, tightly targeted campaigns all by herself.

“RightNow is an awesome tool for delivering the right message to the right customers at the right time,” declares Neiman. “It has become our strategic platform for driving traffic to all of our channels, fostering customer loyalty over time, and heightening our visibility into customer preferences and behaviors.”

The Ultimate Desktop Campaign Command Center

RightNow gives Neiman all the capabilities she needs to quickly design, execute, manage and monitor sophisticated, multi-stage campaigns. With a few keystrokes and clicks of her mouse, she can create compelling messages—including embedded links—and designate groups of recipients from her own databases and/or purchased lists. She can also script appropriate actions to occur when recipients respond and/or fail to respond. And, of course, she can track her open and click-through rates to measure success and determine how to refine and better target subsequent campaigns.

When she first started using RightNow, Neiman began whittling down the list of 335,000 prospects she had inherited to eliminate inactive accounts. Eventually, she brought the list down to 125,000 qualified customers. Based on their responses to outbound emails and/or information they provide about themselves on the company’s website, Neiman can capture a wide range of customer insight. She lets her customers tell her whether they want to receive the company’s direct mail catalog and/or its email newsletter. She finds out whether they only want information about products for a particular age or gender. Customers can also choose to only receive information about a particular category of product, such as clothing or toys. This highly granular opt-in strategy ensures that customers only receive information relevant to their interests—while giving them a strong sense that Right Start knows who they are and what they’re interested in.

Because customers’ needs change as their children grow, it’s particularly important for Right Start to track age. This allows the company to offer products for newborns to women who have just given birth, and then offer them products for baby-proofing their homes when their child is starting to crawl. And, when the child is too old for the company’s products, the name can be removed from the database—unless there’s another baby in the picture.

With RightNow, Neiman can also buy lists of expectant mothers and neatly avoid the touchy issue of pregnancies that don’t go to term. She simply sends a message that prompts the mother to fill in the new baby’s name. Based on that response, she can initiate communications that are age-, gender-, and region-appropriate from the very start of the child’s life.

“With RightNow, we can quickly and easily segment our list by any set of parameters we choose,” says Neiman. “So we’re only limited by our imagination, not by the software or our own level of technical expertise.”

An Integrated Customer Experience

The granular control RightNow provides also enables Neiman to support local stores with geographically targeted promotions. When a new store opens—or if an existing store is holding a special event—Neiman can send local customers a notification and/or a coupon. In some cases, Right Start has closed a mall location in order to open up another one with its own storefront. When this happens, Neiman keeps local customers informed about company’s plans and sends them two promotions: one for the clearance sale at the store that’s closing and another for the grand opening of the new location.

Neiman even lets customers know about new store openings that are further from them than the existing store where they currently shop, but in the same metropolitan area. The idea behind this kind of promotion is that customers who have already demonstrated loyalty to the company’s brand may have friends or relatives who live by the new store. By giving the recipient one coupon for the store where they already shop and another that they can pass along to a friend or relative near the new store, Neiman can reinforce an existing customer’s loyalty and win new business at the same time.

The use of the internet to promote bricks-and-mortar shopping accomplishes several objectives. First, it drives retail traffic to generate more immediate revenue for the company. Second, it gives customers a sense that they’re dealing with a single company via multiple channels—rather than a local store and an online shopping site that have nothing to do with each other.

Third, the blended promotion has raised awareness within Right Start itself about how the company’s channels can work together synergistically. In fact, store managers now pro-actively contact Neiman when they’re planning a special sale or event so that they can be sure she provides them with appropriate marketing support.

“To succeed as a multi-channel retailer, it’s essential that your store managers understand how your online channels support bricks-and-mortar business—rather than competing with it,” explains Neiman. “By making it so easy for me to design and execute campaigns for specific locations, RightNow has enabled me to work closely with store managers to increase store traffic and build strong relationships with local customers.”

Right Start is also integrating RightNow with its online store, so that its customer experience is seamlessly personalized across both systems. For example, if customers ask to only receive promotional information about pink products, when they click on a link to the company’s online store they will initially be presented only with pink products. Conversely, when customers express a preference while visiting the online store, that preference will be reflected in the promotional mailings they receive.

“Customers don’t think of themselves as interacting with your ecommerce application or your marketing application. In their minds, they’re simply interacting with your company,” says Neiman. “By integrating our customer-facing systems, we are able to ensure that this customer perception is, in fact, a reality.”

Multi-Purpose Communications Drive Higher ROI

Neiman has also used RightNow to recruit new employees. “From experience, we know that our customers often turn out to be great employees,” she says. “So when one of our stores needed to do some hiring, we sent out a notice to customers living within a 15-minute radius along with a $50 gift certificate—and got 15 great résumés as a result.”

In addition to enabling her to localize Right Start’s campaigns, RightNow is giving Neiman insight into the differences in consumer responses from region to region. Consumers in some parts of the country, for example, are more likely to respond to special pricing offers on specific products. In other areas, more generalized promotions are more effective. By tracking these trends and designing her campaigns accordingly, Neiman is able to boost response rates and revenue.

With the flexibility to support all these various marketing objectives—and ease-of-use that allows her to handle these diverse projects all by herself—Neiman says her company’s total return-on-investment for RightNow is virtually incalculable.

“It’s very hard to assign a dollar value to the kind of intimacy and information RightNow is enabling us to build with just one full-time manager and zero drain on our IT department’s financial and human resources,” says Neiman. “At this point, it is inconceivable to me that we’d ever try to run our business without RightNow.”

She adds that RightNow’s support is as impressive as its technology. “RightNow has always worked very closely with us to make sure that we get the maximum value from their solution,” she says. “So whether I’m trying to get creative with segmentation rules or doing a software upgrade right in the middle of one of our busy seasons, they’ve always made sure I succeed.”

Right Start Support Site  |  Right Start Homepage

About The Right Start

Right Start is the largest national specialty retailer of juvenile products for infants and young children. Parents have trusted the company for innovative, high-quality, safety-tested products since 1985. Right Start carries a carefully selected assortment of the finest quality strollers, car seats, developmental toys, books, videos, music, nursery accessories, gifts and home safety items—plus a complete assortment of care products. The company reaches its customers through 32 stores nationwide, direct-mail print catalogs and a complete eCommerce website.