The Company
King Arthur Flour is one of America’s best-selling flours, known by avid bakers for its consistent baking performance and lack of chemical additives. King Arthur sells its all-natural flours to retailers, bakeries and food service companies nationwide. It also sells its flours, baking ingredients and equipment at its retail store in Norwich, Vt., through its Web site, kingarthurflour.com, and in its catalogs mailed to millions of households annually.
The Challenge
Email is a big component of King Arthur Flour’s marketing efforts, used to educate customers, increase brand loyalty and drive revenue. However, the company wanted to learn more about customer preferences so it could deliver more relevant, targeted messaging that would engage recipients even more strongly.
“Our goal was to focus on implementing a more sophisticated email marketing strategy, which required finding an email solution that would allow our marketing team to gain deeper customer insights,” said Halley Silver, director of online marketing, The King Arthur Flour Company.
The Solution
King Arthur Flour selected Silverpop Engage as its email provider based upon its usability, functionality and integration capabilities. “Our implementation went very smoothly. We found Silverpop easy to work with from day one,” Silver said. “If we have any questions, the customer service team is always helpful and responsive.”
Today, King Arthur Flour uses Silverpop Engage to send out two to three targeted emails per week to its subscribers. Emails include recipes, new product announcements, sweepstakes and educational resources for bakers. King Arthur Flour uses Silverpop Engage’s Share-to-Social feature in all its promotional emails to help expand the reach of these messages. “Share-to-Social enables us to encourage customers to share our recipes on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon,” Silver said. “Every email we send has a recipe in it, and Share-to-Social makes it easy for them to go viral.”
King Arthur Flour is also taking advantage of Silverpop’s relational tables functionality to connect Silverpop Engage with its order management system to send emails based on purchase order history and cart abandonment. “One of our goals was to find new ways to remarket to our customers by taking advantage of the data in our backend system,” Silver said. “With the flexibility of Silverpop’s relational tables, we are able to leverage that data to shape our email strategy.”
To gain even deeper insights into its customer preferences, King Arthur Flour is utilizing Silverpop Survey in conjunction with Engage, to gather data from survey responses to send targeted messages based on subscriber preferences. For example, King Arthur will send subscribers an email that links to a survey. Using Silverpop’s Survey product, King Arthur creates a questionnaire asking questions like “For which holidays do you like to bake?” With this data, King Arthur Flour Company targets customers with follow-up messages, such as a personalized Halloween recipe email to subscribers that expressed interest in receiving recipes for that holiday.
The Results
King Arthur’s experience confirms that relevancy is key when it comes to successful email marketing. “When we implemented Engage, our goal was to send more targeted emails to our customers,” Silver said. “We are now emailing more often per week to smaller lists. This approach is clearly resonating with our subscriber base, as we had a 150 percent increase in ROI.”
King Arthur is seeing new subscribers sign up for its emails every day as it focuses on sending relevant content and encouraging recipients to share this content. In 2009, its list size grew by 20 percent, a testament to the social-sharing aspect of its emails, as well as links to its blog and contests that engage its subscribers.
Finally, King Arthur met its goal of gaining deeper insights into customer preferences through surveys and was able to utilize that data with Silverpop’s relational tables. It has successfully used these insights to remarket to its customers. For example, King Arthur has collected hundreds of product reviews through its post-purchase emails. In addition to using these ratings in its emails and on its Web site to inform customers, King Arthur also shares them with the customer service, marketing and merchandising teams to shape product direction.
Download the PDF to learn how King Arthur Flour increased its email revenue by 150% with better targeting.
