Ex | E-mail marketing, most essential tool today: Shoppers Stop's Vaibhav Joshi

With a fast growing internet population, e-mail marketing has rapidly gained ground in an India. It is one of the fastest catching trends among companies today. Email marketing refers to the use of the email channel to communicate your message customized to an individual’s requirements.

Email cuts across these stages and can be effectively deployed to engage with customers through their entire life cycle. The digital medium and email offers marketers the ability to customize their communication; get direct feedback from the consumers regarding their products & services and design promotion offers to suit the varying needs of each individual consumer in the target group.

Companies are looking at addressing the requirements of an internet savvy consumer base who look at the internet at various stages of their buying cycle including gathering information about the product/service they are planning to buy; seeking peer advice and recommendations for their purchase; finding places where they can buy – these could be online and offline; comparing products and services from different brands and to get good deals on their purchase.

Says Vaibhav Joshi, Head- Loyalty & Analytics, Shoppers Stop, “E-mail marketing is one of the most essential tools for us as we continue to reach out to our customers and talk to them. E-mail is an essential piece every week, as we send out different e-mails to different set of customers every week.” He was speaking to Adgully on the sidelines of the recently concluded IAMAI’s E-mail marketing summit.

We caught-up with Joshi to understand as a marketer how he and his team is optimally using E-mail marketing to add value to his brand. He stressed on having a proper strategy for e-mail marketing. He said, “Shoppers Stop as a part of e-mail marketing process, don’t source e-mail data from outside, as we  essentially talk to only those customers who enroll with us in the first season programme and who provide their data and e-mail address to access.”

At Shoppes Stop segmentation is a primary factor that matters before starting off with e-mail, they look at creating as many micro segments as possible and they continue to keep segmenting their customers and database. Joshi feels segmentation is a challenge for them most of the time as he explained, “Often in retail, customers falls in multiple segments as they buy products from different segments. When such situation occurs, it’s a difficult task for us to decide in which segment we should put that customer in and to share the right message to that customer.”
Shoppers Stop being a client doesn’t focus much on technological aspects of delivering the final e-mail as they feel that the service provider i.e. the e-mail marketing company should take care of that aspect.

E-mail marketing is a part of marketing, so we asked Joshi to explain how e-mail marketing is used, on which he added, “There are certain pieces of marketing that is TVC or print media which is very expensive, but when we have to promote new in-house or small brand in low budget, we use e-mail marketing to establish that brand for our customers.”

Joshi further explored that, “Being a premium retailer we don’t look up to adding customers just for the sake of adding but we want to bring in premium set of customers where they have to pay to become a member of our program. And once when they become member with us, we start communicating with them on e-mail but unless they don’t become member we don’t go and communicate with anybody.”

He asserted that every e-mail that goes to customers account and if he/ she doesn’t respond is a waste. So, the philosophy that Shoppers Stop use is that if the brands are not in the positive framework of e-mail reader’s thought, then there is no point in sending the e-mail to them. The real action is not when the customer opens the mail but when the customer comes to store and buy the product. Shoppers Stop now have gone a step ahead to create their own mobile app that will enable customers to get updates and information of the brands they like.

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