Seventh Generation Uses Bronto To Quadruple Website Visits
Background:
Seventh Generation is one the country’s first self-declared “socially responsible” companies. With an extensive line of non-toxic household products, Seventh Generation is committed to keeping toxic chemicals out of the environment. With a socially conscious target audience, it is not surprising that their online presence is a central feature of their marketing efforts.
Challenges:
Like many companies, Seventh Generation uses email marketing to increase brand loyalty, drive website and blog traffic, and ultimately increase sales offline. When Chris Middings joined Seventh Generation, he found their email marketing program needed significant improvements. “It was email 0.5 technology as opposed to 1.0 or 2.0. It left a lot to be desired. I was also amazed at how dirty the lists were – about 10-15% was absolute garbage – clearly the work of some dedicated spammers, filling the list with pornographic junk. It’s amazing nobody ever noticed this, but no one was looking.”
At Middings’ suggestion, Seventh Generation came to Bronto to help solve their email marketing
challenges. Middings stated, “It’s important for me to have a robust partner in email marketing and Bronto fits that bill. They’re very responsive and very real. As a client, you get to know their employees, and they become partners with you in navigating this landscape. They’re reliable experts who listen. If you think their system needs an improvement, they’ll make it. If they don’t know something immediately, they’ll find out quickly. You don’t feel like a small fish with them; they want to help everybody do a better job of email marketing.”
Solutions:
Once on board with Bronto, Seventh Generation began to actively promote their list to grow it organically. “We promote our newsletter on every product we ship and also encourage opt-ins through contests, at trade shows, at consumer events and on our homepage. We require consumers to register before they can download coupons. That’s a big driver for subscriptions,” said Middings. In addition to increasing their opt-in list, they also improved their list hygiene/maintenance. They actively promote Bronto’s manage preferences page to anyone who wishes to unsubscribe. “Many of those individuals who are interested in unsubscribing would just prefer fewer emails. Using the manage preferences’ functionality, we can retain their subscription and relationship. Another great thing about Bronto is they make the process easy for subscribers. Their manage preferences page is a lifesaver. It’s a dashboard of communication preferences instead of just an on/off switch. We’ve saved thousands of unsubscribes from unsubscribing by giving them options. We let them decide how often they want to hear from us.” mentioned Middings. While growing their list, Middings also worked more and more closely with Bronto to grow the sophistication of the analytic side of their email marketing program. “I’ve had a great experience using an API with Bronto, whereas in the past, it’s been difficult to work with other providers on APIs. With their API, data integration is a breeze.” said Middings. “In the analytics, their system is amazing in its ability to slice and dice. For surveys and invitations, we’re always looking to pull rather complex segments of our subscribers, and the system lets you do that with Boolean logic – easy AND/OR statements. Segmentation is so easy for us now.”
Seventh Generation also strives to maintain a high quality of email marketing content. By monitoring the popularity of links to blog posts and articles, Seventh Generation can determine which topics should be promoted in future newsletters. They can also closely monitor reaction to promotional articles and ensure they meet the subscriber’s expectations. “Another thing I really like is their interface where you can see right in the email exactly what people clicked on. This allows me to share this data visually, which means I don’t need to explain it as much. It explains itself no matter who you’re presenting it to.”
Results:
With Bronto’s help in list growth, list hygiene and relevant content, Seventh Generation has seen their email marketing prosper. Seventh Generation has found email marketing success in the key metrics they track for success - high open rates, a growing subscriber list, and a steady stream of online traffic due to email marketing campaigns. Their website traffic averages 315% increase in unique website visits in the four days following an email campaign. Prior to Bronto, Seventh Generation would usually generate a 14% open rate, whereas now the average open rate is nearly double at 25%, with some individual campaigns achieving open rates as high as 71%.
“I expected an improvement, but I didn’t think it would be anywhere near an 11-point increase in opens,” said Middings. As you can imagine, email marketing wasn’t a high priority for the company before, but with these kinds of results, it has become much more visible inside the company. With Bronto’s expert advice, our company has achieved extraordinary results making email marketing a critical aspect of our marketing operations. We could not have done it without the great folks at Bronto.”
“Having a dedicated account rep that I meet with regularly has been extremely helpful. We have spent a lot of time discussing email marketing best practices and brainstorming new ways to improve results, grow revenue and create a better brand experience. Having an email marketing partner that cares about that kind of dialogue makes a difference.”
Katie Holler
Director of eCommerce,
D'Artagnan
