Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: Staying Close to Shoppers with Hammacher Schlemmer’s Jenn Dumas
At the onset of COVID-19, one thing became clear: Retailers needed guidance. In an effort to help brands operate effectively and efficiently in this digital world, we launched Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: A biweekly series with bite-sized episodes tackling the latest in retail, featuring established marketers from today’s biggest brands.
On today’s episode, join Sarah Cascone and Jenn Dumas as they discuss digital marketing, third party cookies, email marketing and more. Plus, see how Bluecore’s digital personalization platform has helped Hammacher Schlemmer meet the needs of their customers.
CASCONE: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Coffee & Commerce. Joining me today is Jenn Dumas, Director of Marketing at Hammacher Schlemmer, which if you don’t know it, is the longest running catalog with a very unique flagship department store in the heart of New York.
Jenn is responsible for all things digital, and like most digital marketers in the space right now, is determining the best way to stay close to the shopper. Jenn, thanks for joining me.
JENN: Thanks for having me.
CASCONE: So we know retailers are at all different levels of sophistication with their digital strategy, which as you know, has accelerated dramatically over the past year and a half. What has been the biggest priority for you and your team through all this?
JENN: We are really focusing on ad spend and how to allocate our ad spend across different marketing channels, especially in light of those third-party cookie changes.
CASCONE: And how do you know what’s working with those changes?
JENN: Great question. We’re really looking at the upfront KPIs for each individual channel and ensuring that our KPIs are keeping up with the channel. We’re also looking at those KPIs for the customer and what customer value we’re bringing, whether we’re bringing in the new customer or we’re retaining a house file customer.
One of the big KPIs that we also like to look at when we’re looking at the channel KPI is looking at our customer repurchase rate in the first 90 days. Typically we find a higher repurchase rate in first 90 days indicates that we have a higher lifetime value out of that customer. So really looking at short-term and long-term.
CASCONE: That’s really smart. I think many of the brands we work with are revamping their approach in that way, especially with paid media, to increase the efficiency and the reach with which they’re meeting their customers on those channels. So when you’re looking at the entire digital customer experience, curious what your stance is on the impact of email in particular.
JENN: Email’s so critical, just to be brutally honest, it’s so critical to our business and to our customers. We have excellent customer engagement with all of our email programs. And we’re even finding that as we’re driving new customers to our website that have very little experience of Hammacher Schlemmer, they’re subscribing themselves into our Bluecore stream, which has been just fabulous because then we can use our Bluecore intelligence and really develop them into a long-term customer for the business.
CASCONE: Email’s definitely becoming both, I think, a conversion engine for a digital marketing team and also a nurture engine so you can keep them buying again and again and see that rebuy rate just go up. And I think another interesting point there too is email is really the only channel that is context managed by the shopper. You see what they’re clicking on, what they’re searching for, and those signals are so critical to informing the next best communication. What’s your perspective on personalization’s role?
JENN: Oh, again, it’s absolutely critical. Customers are dynamic, their needs, their wants. Everything’s constantly changing. And I love that we have this Bluecore intelligence to help us as a company keep up with the needs of our customers. Every customer can change on a daily basis, what they need in the morning, what they want in the afternoon is completely different. With your other channels either you need a customer who has intent knows what they want, or you have to take a guess that, okay, three weeks, four weeks from now you’ll want one of these 300 items that we have in our catalog, whereas Bluecore is always on it. They know exactly what the customer’s doing and when they’re doing it and they can pivot, and our email strategies can pivot as a customer’s pivot.
CASCONE: It’s such a great point. Every human being is completely individual. And to be able to keep up with that dynamism is almost impossible for a marketer to do on their own. So I love that. You’re recognizing the need to balance the human intervention there. And the focus on rebuy rates is huge. I think many marketers are going to start using that to define what retention means to them moving forward. Well, Jenn, thank you so much for joining me today and thank you everyone for joining Coffee & Commerce.
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