RedEnvelope Offers Something New—Content
RedEnvelope tried something new when it launched Inside The Box, an e-mail newsletter, in August. Veering from the obvious, the multi-channel marketer decided to focus not on products but on advice.
San Francisco-based RedEnvelope offers upscale gifts through its catalog, Web site and product newsletters. The latter are sent roughly once a week to a subscriber list of opt-in recipients, says Stephanie Peterson, e-mail marketing manager for the company.
But Inside The Box is a quarterly. And it has a whole other mission: To help subscribers in their daily lives.
“We want to touch our customers in a different way,” says Peterson. “We want to create a dialog with them, entertain them and engage them.”
Enabled by CheetahMail, RedEnvelope’s e-mail services vendor, Inside The Box meets those goals by offering useful editorial. For example, it has an Ask the Gift Expert feature, a Gift Horoscope section and material on how to write the perfect gift card. Products will be featured from time to time, but only when they can be tied to a story. (For example, an article on silver and how to care for it).
Subscribers will be asked questions, given polls and requested to participate in surveys so the firm can learn more about them and their needs. “We may even include contests or ask them to send us a Haiku,” says Peterson.
However, Peterson is still taking baby steps in this area. “We’re not going to do customer profiles,” she says. “We don’t want to push it, or have them feel that we’re getting too much information.”
That doesn’t mean that the questions won’t be asked—only that a response won’t be required.
Since sales are not the primary focus of the new e-newsletter it will be difficult to measure success in traditional terms. “We’re not expecting to get the amount of sales that we get from product e-mails,” says Peterson. But there is an attainable goal.
“We hope that they’ll see us as a gift authority and the e-newsletter will increase the open and conversion rates on our product e-mails,” she adds.
The plan is to keep the product e-mails and the e-newsletter separate, but the possibility of future incorporation of the two exists.
