Hammacher Schlemmer Hones 1:1 Personalization to Grow Digital Revenue

Hammacher Schlemmer is America’s longest-running catalog, founded in 1848 and providing a wide variety of unique products that solve problems for consumers. In the 170+ years since its inception, Hammacher Schlemmer has added to its catalog business, also selling products through its ecommerce website and landmark store in New York City.

While the retailer honors its legacy, it also keeps an eye toward the future, staying current with products and trends to continue attracting new customers. 

Finding the Right Technology to Power a Modern Marketing Program

Hammacher Schlemmer’s forward-looking approach also extends to its marketing strategy. In fact, it was the driving force behind the retailer’s decision to improve personalization to deliver better 1:1 experiences for shoppers.

“We knew the future of email was in personalization and that was the direction we wanted to go. We wanted to modernize our email marketing efforts to not just maintain performance, but also be best-in-class,” explains Kira Verni, Email Marketing Manager at Hammacher Schlemmer.

However, the team realized that their existing marketing technology could not support these goals.

In evaluating their options, the team found that their triggered emails, which they had run through Bluecore for several years, continued to perform well and see compounding growth. Verni advocated moving all of the brand’s emails over to Bluecore so that they could take advantage of the platform’s easy access to data, advanced predictive models and automation to introduce more personalization in email as well as other channels.

“We saw the direction Bluecore was moving and we felt like it was something we needed to be a part of. We had to educate internally about why such a paradigm shift was important, but we had the performance data to back us up,” shares Ann Marie Resnick, Vice President of Marketing at Hammacher Schlemmer.

Developing a Best-in-Class Digital Marketing Program

With the right technology in place, Hammacher Schlemmer’s marketing team began to make significant strides toward their goal of improving 1:1 personalization through a best-in-class digital marketing program. In particular, this involved:

Growing Email Revenue Through Intelligent 1:1 Personalization

Hammacher Schlemmer achieved 16% year-over-year revenue growth in email by activating customer data through Bluecore to power intelligent and automated personalized campaigns at the individual level.

“Our product catalog is a mile wide and an inch deep — we sell a lot of things to make our customers’ lives easier, but that made it hard for our marketing team to do any kind of segmentation, let alone personalization,” Resnick says. “Bluecore changed that. It allowed us to observe and act on what customers do onsite, and once we were able to access that knowledge, our email program just took off.”

Expanding Reach and Audience with a Purposeful Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy

The retailer also tapped Bluecore to help convert new customers and increase the efficiency of social media spend by sharing intelligent audience data across channels for more coordinated cross-channel campaigns.

“Bringing the intelligence from Bluecore to Facebook has allowed us to be super efficient with our social spend and acquire new names that are outside of our typical customer base,” Resnick shares.

Continuing to Develop a Best-in-Class Digital Marketing Program

Introducing Bluecore has given Hammacher Schlemmer the tools they need to continue to stay ahead of the curve by regularly testing and learning with different campaigns across channels. Most importantly, Bluecore has helped Hammacher Schlemmer produce steady year-over-year increases in email revenue.

Interested in learning more about Hammacher Schlemmer’s growth? Click here to get the full story.