Lake Champlain Chocolates
Vermont-based premium gourmet chocolate maker Lake Champlain Chocolates (LCC) offers sweet indulgences that capture the essence of Vermont, the tradition of making fine chocolate, and the pride that goes into each bite. Preservative-free and Kosher-certified, LCC chocolates are crafted in small batches from the finest quality Belgian chocolate and select natural ingredients.
Challenges:
LCC faced challenges similar to many retailers in today’s competitive market – how to drive online sales forward and increase their brand awareness. The company wanted to implement an email program in conjunction with other related marketing campaigns in order to:
- Increase online sales
- Improve the quality of interaction with its customers
- Generate awareness for holiday offerings
- Holidays spread out over an extended period of time such as Thanksgiving and Christmas generate more revenues
- Holidays such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day are generally lighter in revenues because of the more limited timeframe
Solution:
Lake Champlain Chocolates implemented Bronto’s email marketing technology because of its easy-to-use interface, competitive pricing, and feature set designed around the needs of online retailers. Bronto provides LCC with:
- Segmentation capabilities
- LCC segments user database by customer attributes and past email behavior (i.e., whether or not a contact opened an initial email)
- LCC maximizes outreach by resending same message content with updated subject line to unopened segment
- Reporting
- LCC analyzes reported data to determine effectiveness of special promotional campaigns
- LCC analyzes user behavior to gauge how customers move from an email message through the website and ultimately to a sale
- Based on findings, LCC adjusts email campaigns accordingly by targeting certain user segments with sale promotions and customizing message content
- Deliverability
- LCC routinely reviews undeliverable messages and inactive contacts before each sent mail and at least once weekly
- LCC marketing team cleans out undeliverable, inactive, and unsubscribed addresses from contact list to maintain premium whitelist status
Results:
Within a short timeframe, Bronto helped LCC boost its email sales by 50%.
- Email campaigns adjusted due to user behavior patterns see increased open rates, deliverability, and response rates
- While routine cleaning decreases number of addresses in contact list, LCC has experienced at least the same open and click-thru rates
- Successful targeted campaigns
- Recent promotion in which hot chocolate was put on sale garnered open rate of 29% and click-thrus of 7.3% with over a 10% conversion rate
- LCC followed-up with a non-open resend email a week following the initial outreach and received strong open rates and conversion rate of over 8%
- Special holiday campaigns have proven to be very successful. Recent Valentine’s Day-related promotions included:
- Free upgrade to 2nd day air – usually an $8 upcharge; anyone ordering up to Monday the 12th received Valentine’s Day delivery
- 1st Valentine’s Day campaign sent January 16th – 25% open rate, 20% click-thru, and 6% conversion rate
- 2nd Valentine’s Day campaign sent January 30th – 27% open rate, 5.5% click-thru, and 10% conversion rate
“Superb. Bronto is very easy to use and has the dedicated support I found pleasantly surprising as a small organization.”
Michael Lowery
Development Director,
Ronald McDonald House
