Online Watch Retailing Site in "Constant Contact®" With Customers To Drive Traffic and Repeat Sales

Founded in early 1998 and headquartered in McAllen, Texas, WatchZone.com has grown to become the Internet's leading site for fashion and sport watches at discount prices. Offering leading brands such as Armani, Calvin Klein, Fossil, Movado, Nike, Tag Heuer, and more, WatchZone was named one of the hottest holiday shopping sites by Fortune magazine. The site averages 3 million page views each month.

With prices ranging from $35 to $2,000, WatchZone offers more than 5,000 styles from more than 30 brands. Currently, its "sweet-spot" target market is in the $50-500 mass market, although, soon, the company plans to pursue the luxury market (where watches typically average more than $1,000), adding brands such as Omega and Cartier.

According to Shavi Mahtani, CEO of WatchZone.com, one of the primary challenges for his company is driving high-volume traffic to the site. "We have a strategic agreement with America OnLine as one of their commerce partners," he said. "That gives us nice visibility, but it's also quite expensive. And, after AOL has driven a buyer to our site, we want a way to retain that buyer as 'ours.' We think direct e-mail can be a key strategy to achieve those goals."

At first, WatchZone used a stripped-down e-mail system offered by its hosting-services provider. "We tried that just once," Mahtani said. "And after just one use, it was clear to us that the generic e-mail capabilities that this provider offered weren't worth our time and effort. It was too basic, too 'vanilla.' It had no personalization. You couldn't extract and merge information from our databases. And, since it was only a pure-text service, you couldn't use HTML for fonts, colors, and images. It flat-out didn't look professional."

CONSTANT CONTACT: "EVERYTHING I WAS LOOKING FOR"

At a major Internet tradeshow, Mahtani got his first exposure to Constant Contact, seeing a demonstration of the personalized direct e-mail marketing solution. The award-winning Constant Contact brings the successful e-marketing techniques used by Web leaders to small and medium e-businesses - quickly, seamlessly and cost effectively.

Constant Contact helps e-businesses create customer loyalty, drive repeat sales and build lifetime customer value by automating targeted, personalized, and relevant e-mail communications with their Internet customers, including new-product announcements, order-status updates, and seasonal/holiday alerts. Since it is integrated with popular commerce storefront software, Constant Contact capitalizes on the rich data available for targeting and personalization (such as customer profiles, order history, and product information), enabling rapid implementation. Constant Contact is available from hosting providers at a low monthly fee.

"I really liked the product," Mahtani said. "After previously trying an inadequate alternative, I could see that Constant Contact had everything I was looking for. And it was obvious that it was easy to use as well."

COMPLETE PAYBACK IN EIGHT WEEKS -- JUST TWO MAILINGS

Marketing experts continue to agree: it's far less expensive to sell to an existing customer than to find a new one. WatchZone.com has embraced that philosophy with Constant Contact. "Our goal is to get customers that are in our database to come back and shop with us again for different seasonal events," said Mahtani. "We decided to test Constant Contact on 15,000 of our customers with a special promotion on Swiss Army watches."

According to Mahtani, building the promotional e-mail in Constant Contact was straightforward. "It's very easy to use," he said. "It's wizard-based and pre-built letters are well-laid-out. You just fill out a few parameters and it kicks out your promo mailing. There are some easy templates to get you started, but we just used our own text. This is definitely something a non-techie can do. It took us about 45 minutes - start to finish - to build and compose our e-mail. And each campaign since then has taken less time to set up."

In response to that first campaign, WatchZone received 100 online orders - all from that set of 15,000 current customers. The average sale was about $150 per order. "We were very happy with that result," said Mahtani. "Frankly, it exceeded our expectations. And, after we finished our second campaign a few weeks later, we had already seen enough volume to achieve more than a 100-percent payback on our investment in Constant Contact."

In addition, WatchZone also saw significant increases in traffic at their site. "We didn't quantify it, but you could tell that our page loads went up significantly as a result of the campaign," Mahtani said. "And some responders - even though they didn't buy a watch - still opted in to receive future mailings, so we're very encouraged by that."

More recently, WatchZone has run promotional campaigns tied to Father's Day sales. "We sent out e-mail to 30,000 people," said Mahtani, "and in one week, we generated more than 300 sales that also averaged $150."

In just a few weeks, Mahtani will unveil his company's second entrepreneurial venture: Scentopia.com, which will be the second in a string of network concept shops that he expects will provide synergy with WatchZone as well. "The demographics for the two are quite similar, so we anticipate significant cross-selling opportunities. And, while watches are a more durable item, fragrance is a consumable product that creates a steadier stream of repeat business - which makes Constant Contact an ideal - and critical - contributor to our marketing activities going forward. I would definitely recommend this to other small businesses."

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Company Profile

• Leading watch merchant on the Web
• 3 million page views each month
• 5,000 styles of watches from 34 leading brands

Challenge

• Converting customers in database into repeat buyers.
• Presenting professional, compelling, relevant offers to customers
• Deploying quickly without in-depth technical knowledge

Solution

• Constant Contact, the direct-marketing solution that drives repeat sales for online merchants with targeted, personalized and relevant e-mails (such as new product announcements, order status updates, holiday and seasonal alerts, and more) to Internet shoppers and customers.

Benefits

• Rapid deployment - only 45 minutes to create first campaign
• No technical knowledge required: "This is definitely something a non-techie can do."
• Fast results - see responses within hours and wrap up a campaign in a few days.
• First campaign generated $15,000 in sales - 100 orders averaging $150 each.
• Recent Father's Day campaign to 30,000 names generated $45,000 in sales in one week.
• 100 percent payback on Constant Contact investment in less than two months through just two campaigns.