If Lenox Collections is powered by solid marketing plans, strong sales and continuous growth, then the Internet unit adds a small but potent amount of rocket fuel.
Between May and September of this year sales were up 7% over 2000 for Lenox Collections, the direct division of Lenox Inc., says the division’s president Martha Curran. Internet sales, meanwhile, were an astounding 132% higher than the previous May-September period. Online sales represent 5% of the direct business; last year they accounted for only 3%.
Lenox Collections markets glass figurines, gifts and home décor items. It is renowned for its themed collectibles, such as its lighthouse assortment, which ranges from Christmas decorations to salt and pepper shakers to thimbles, all shaped as those beacons of the sea.
Reacting to the strong growth, Lenox Collections has increased its advertising expenditures by 6% this year over last, sending out 10% to 20% more print direct mail. But the Internet sector has helped keep those dollars efficient.
“Expenditures are very low on the Internet,” says Ken Bausch, assistant vice president of Internet business. “Our customers are coming as a result of the millions we’re spending everywhere else.” The Web site address (www.lenoxcollections.com) is on the pages of the millions of catalogs mailed annually; it’s also printed on invoices and included in DR space ads in national magazines. That integration is key to the online unit’s success.
A site redesign unveiled in September features the Catalog Quick Buy, which makes available all 2,000 products the division carries. “We can sell every single active [stock-keeping unit],” Bausch enthuses. “Our best sellers [in the direct division] are still our best sellers [online], but we get more sales in the less active SKUs now through the Internet. This has definitely helped sales overall.”
With Quick Buy, visitors can browse the paper catalog and order online by keying in the catalog SKU number. The selection is ordered automatically, so customers don’t have to search. If the product is no longer featured in the paper catalog, customers can search for it on the Web site. What if site users decide as they’re checking out that they want a bit more information on a product? They can click on the shopping cart and view a photo and description.
“Our conversion rate more than doubled for the month of September since the redesign,” Bausch says.
The DR ads with coupons drive the majority of the customers to the direct division, and many of those visit the Web site first.
And 60% of buyers at the Web site are new. They find Lenoxcollections.com by typing in the company name on an Internet search engine. “There’s very high awareness of the Lenox brand name — it’s 89% in market research studies,” Curran notes. E-mail prospecting, on the other hand, has brought poor results, so it has been abandoned.
While the usual Lenox Collections customer is female, 40-plus, with a high school education and a midrange income, these new Web customers are younger, more affluent and typically male. Also, they’re probably more likely to be shopping for a gift, rather than adding to their angel collection.
Customers who buy first on the Web site receive paper catalogs and direct mail, in addition to e-mail promotions. They may pick and choose what they wish to keep getting, or opt out of nothing.
E-mail promotions usually go out monthly but increase to weekly in November and December. While the offline customer file is segmented to target promotions to groups as small as 500 or as many as 5,000 customers, the online customers are not segmented at all. Nor is there an online VIP Gold Member group, which comprises the top 20% of customers, as there is offline. That’s because the online buyers are just too new and their purchase history is too recent, Bausch says.
The Web site employees work side by side with the other direct employees in Langhorne, PA, and fulfillment and customer service are integrated. The channel a customer orders from initiates that individual’s purchase history and helps to target future promotions to new buyers.
Thanks to these efforts, the e-mail customer file has grown 53% from May to September. The e-mail list is not on the market. There are, however, 1.28 million customer names in the postal file. More than 200,000 of them bought something in the last three months, and more than 800,000 purchased in the last year.
So far, Web buyers are turning out to be as loyal as catalog customers. “The e-commerce customers are good customers,” Curran says. “They buy from other promotions and they come back.”
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