Wedding registry’s live chat brings the customers back The Wedding List, a gift registry company, borrows marketing tactics from the new and old economies to consummate customer relationships.

It finds prospects with print advertising, and boosts sales with online customer service.

But the company learned this mix the hard way.

When the London-based retailer expanded to the U.S. in 1999, the company planned to rely on the Internet to make its name here. With the opening of the first store in New York, followed by another in Boston (a third will debut in San Francisco this fall), founder and CEO Gregg Renfrew devoted major emphasis to promoting the Web site. Indeed, for the future, her strategy includes using retail stores and a catalog (which appears occasionally) to drive traffic to the Web site (www.theweddinglist.com).

Brides and grooms visit the Wedding List store or Web site (instead of the customary department store) to register for gifts for their wedding. About 200 manufacturers supply the company. Some couples authorize the site to send an e-mail to the guest list with gift reminders. Other couples’ guests just visit the site (or store) and consult the registry. The average order ranges from $100 to $250.

Within months after the site’s launch, Renfrew had lost confidence in banner advertising. Banners just cannot be targeted effectively enough to reach the right audience, she says. Even the affiliate deals with other Web sites and search engines disappointed her. When other sites link to yours, “you may get a lot of eyeballs looking at your site, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get sales,” she points out.

She abandoned banners and online partnerships. Instead, she invested in space ads in bridal magazines to generate traffic and online sales. “We reach prospects when we advertise in the bridal magazines because we know everyone [who is getting married] reads them,” she remarks. Reticent about providing response rates, Renfrew says, online ads “pale” in comparison to response generated by offline means.

By January 2000, Renfrew had also implemented online e-mail chats to provide customer service in real time on the Web site. That decision was the turning point. Today, online transactions have increased to 45 percent of total sales, up from 15 percent in January 2000.

One reason for the uptick – brides need assistance more than any other type of customer. They are anxious that the biggest event of their lives goes well, and they want to set up their home properly, Renfrew comments.

Each bride typically asks four or five questions about etiquette and practical matters. Typical requests: “What’s the difference bone china and porcelain? “How many place settings should I have?” “Should I get the sterling and the stainless flatware?” The reps’ presence in real time is reassuring to the bride. So are features such as the reps’ ability to transmit photographs of products directly to the customer, just as she’s asking about them.

Another reason the live chat increases sales is the same reason the retail stores are the leading channel: There are reps on hand to encourage customers to spend more money.

Now that customers interact with online reps instead of by telephone as they did the first year, the Wedding List has reduced order-processing time and expense. In 2000, the company’s online ordering accelerated while the number of phone orders dipped to 22 percent of all orders. In 1999, the phone orders comprised 35 percent of transactions.

Renfrew says her company has no plans to use live voice chats over the Internet anytime soon because too few consumers have access to the technology to make it worthwhile.

That decision, like others about the site design, is based on keeping the look simple and easy to use. Too much content or promotional copy and flashy high-tech applications can be obstacle to shopping, Renfrew maintains. “We stick to the basics,” she points out, which include quality photos and meeting the customers’ needs. “People are going there to buy gifts, not to learn about weddings and the wedding industry.”

The Wedding List segments brides, grooms and their wedding guests who purchase gifts for them. The company tracks by product, wedding and gift category, using transactional data from the Web site, catalog and retail stores.

The goal is to establish a customer relationship that lasts beyond one wedding, since most people attend several weddings in their lifetime, and purchase gifts for anniversaries, house-warmings and other occasions.

The Wedding List is in the early stages a partnership with Nordstrom Inc., a chain of high-end department stores on the West Coast. Renfrew plans to open between three and six stores at Nordstrom later this year. The new stores will have flat screens hung on walls for shoppers to shop at the Wedding List Web site and place orders online.

Men who buy wedding gifts online apparently don’t do it to save time, according to the observations of Gregg Renfrew of the wedding registry company, the Wedding List. Many will actually travel to a retail store, bypass salespersons and use a PC in the store to choose a wedding gift. It’s a mystery why they just don’t shop from a computer at home or work.

Employees at the Wedding List have noted that men shopping at its stores in London, New York and Boston often walk straight to flat computer screens hung on the walls to shop. It may be a man’s irresistible love for gadgets that drives him to shop online while inside a store, speculates Gregg Renfrew.

Continuity marketers have long known that program members are driven by complex motivations

IT’S ABOUT TIME someone took a look at continuity marketing and the relationship between premiums and the respondent’s commitment to a program. This relationship is tenuous, changing and hard to comprehend. But as Yogi Berra has opined about another subject, “Ninety percent of the game is half mental.”

Why look at it now? Because the marketing patterns that have emerged on the Internet have challenged the traditional pattern of response and conversion in direct mail. The Net has such a huge constituency that targeting is a fast-disappearing process. Who cares what the prospect’s intent is? Just throw the offer out there; there are so many of them that you’re sure to get a good response!

Continuity marketing has been at the very center of the lexicon of direct response. It covers a vast territory. Book and record clubs are “continuity” programs. So are insurance and financial plans, as well as some magazine subscription offers.

Historically, continuity marketing has probably been the most lucrative area of direct mail, but in many ways it is the least understood. The process is easy enough to master: You simply sell them with a premium, convert them into repeat purchasers, wait until they’ve proven their creditworthiness and load them up.

But the buyer’s motivation has been more difficult to comprehend. This is important because motivation can – or should – affect the development of premium offers. It’s no secret that there is an inverse relationship between high response to the premium offer and a low conversion. It’s been assumed that this is because merchandisers have made the premium offers so attractive that many people who had no intention of joining the club will do so on impulse – and quickly recant when it comes to spending the real money. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story.

The continuity respondent’s motivation involves a long-term commitment to a procedure that will educate, entertain or protect him. The motivating force might be quite profound. Insurance is about protecting one’s family or self – and of course, it’s a commitment. The urge to join a book program might very well stem from the respondent’s feeling that he must read more to become more active in the world, or become more thoughtful about it. A vertical continuity program (for example, a Gardening Book Club) has at its heart a respondent’s desire to become very, very involved in a particular activity – and throwing himself into it means learning about it on an ongoing basis. The operative phrases here are “involved” and “ongoing.”

This seriousness of purpose validates the respondent’s sense of being a mature human being in a changing world, one that’s making increasing demands on him. This may sound overblown, as the decision to join a continuity will have no earth-shattering effects; he is not, after all, committing to the invasion of Iraq. But the true continuity member has a genuine desire to learn more about the club’s subject, to better himself in serious ways.

The very steps leading through the continuity are those that validate the participant’s seriousness of purpose. An insurance buyer who is willing to get involved in a long-term program that will protect him or his family against unfortunate occurrences will feel steadily rewarded as he pays his premiums – even though he may be somewhat annoyed. But if he stays with it, of course, we know that the rewards outweigh the annoyance; he still feels the original urge to get involved in the process.

Slow and Steady Most important to recognize is that this “seriousness,” while profound, does not necessarily engender an intensity of feeling; often it is more like a quiet preoccupation. One does not climb Everest by running up a hill. Our most mature urges are evolutionary, and although an important decision might be made in an instant, we can be certain that the thought processes leading up to it have taken some time to develop.

It should be added, to complicate matters, that this sense of purpose, when arrived at, is not necessarily long-lasting or final. There are, in fact, all kinds of reconsiderations that pop up in a serious decision-making process.

And that desire to better oneself is conducive to continuity product sales. Wanting to get more involved with gardening is not the same as rushing to the appropriate direct mail house and buying a gardening continuity series. So the direct marketer’s most immediate concern is to convert a buyer’s quiet seriousness to involvement in the program.

Stirring the prospect is the primary reason for the extensive use of premiums in any sale. But it’s a particularly difficult thing to do in continuity sales.

We can see now why premiums that have nothing to do with a program’s subject matter (a $10 million sweepstakes, for example) won’t work in the continuity area, succeeding only in multimagazine offers. It’s not that the financial opportunity is unimportant; this is a case where the reward simply doesn’t fit the respondent’s need at that time.

This also tells us why a premium that strongly attracts respondents to the club’s subject matter (“Everything You Wanted to Know About Gloxinias” as an introductory offer to a gardening club) tends to be counterproductive. Commitment involves a slow evolution from a survey of the entire field to more complex issues within that field. Respondents can be scared out of their wits by getting too involved too quickly.

On the other hand, a company that offers the respondent a huge helping of the product (such as 14 CDs for $1.49) might very well be on the right track, particularly if the product is given to the respondent in stages (five free CDs up front, buy a CD, get five more free CDs). The net effect of this kind of continuity offer is to pace the respondent’s involvement in the program.

Now let’s examine the kind of offer that is most realistic for respondents: the premium that gives them a general introduction to the club’s subject matter (say, “Understanding Home Repairs”). It’s not frightening, but it does meet consumers’ need for involvement – in a practical way.

The real challenge is deciding how to give respondents enough of a premium to further encourage their quest, without giving them so much as to: (1) totally satisfy them for the moment, or (2) turn them off to the subject matter.

The answer to No. 1 is to provide less of what the club has been offering. The answer to No. 2 is to offer something that will act as a general introduction to the club’s subject matter, not a comprehensive volume on one aspect of the subject matter.

Commitment. Because direct mail as a marketing vehicle is able to provide the prospect with a package that is both weighty and complex, it has at times been able to respond to the recipient’s need for commitment. In that respect, mail is unique as an advertising medium. For all the spectacular promise of the Internet as a marketing vehicle, we have yet to learn whether it can satisfy this important desire.