Founded in 1998, Cooking.com is an $8 billion e-commerce website offering a broad range of cookware, product reviews, recipes and interactive forums. Cooking.com also provides online infrastructure and digital marketing support for their broad network of foodie e-commerce websites, including the Food Network Store, the Betty Crocker Store, the Rachael Ray Store, Marley Coffee and others. In addition, Cooking.com offers customer service and warehousing support for a number of the online kitchenware stores within their network.

Growing Customer Engagement Through Lifecycle MarketingCooking.com was going through a rapid growth phase and found itself challenged to scale and control its email marketing initiatives. As an online retail organization that managed email communications across multiple e-commerce websites, Cooking.com was looking for a cross-channel email solution that could deliver timely, relevant and precisely targeted communications to help them remain competitive and stand out from the crowd, especially during the peak holiday retail season. Events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when all marketers were vying for consumers’ limited attention in the inbox, were making it increasingly clear that Cooking.com’s existing in-house email system was not up to the task.

“On Cyber Monday, you want to be in the inbox around 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. when people are just getting into work and finishing their coffee,” said Matt Bunn, Cooking.com’s Director of Email Marketing.

Unfortunately, up to this point, Cooking.com had very little control over when their email offer would reach a given customer. Their existing email solution was at best a blunt instrument. What they needed was the capability to reach the right customer, at the right time, with the right offer.

Seeking a solution, Cooking.com analyzed several different email service providers, but StrongView quickly emerged as the best solution. StrongView’s cross-channel marketing platform offered a very tight fit – not only because of its technical capabilities and reputation for innovation, but also because of StrongView’s Marketing Services team, which helps clients create and optimize marketing campaigns that deliver the most relevant and meaningful cross-channel messaging to customers. In particular, StrongView Message Studio’s lifecycle marketing capabilities are enabling Cooking.com to create campaigns that send specific emails to finely segmented customer groups based on purchase, browse and response data.

Increased Customer Engagement Through Better Lifecycle Marketing

COOKING.COM CASE STUDY

Cooking.com (subsidiary of Target Corporation)Santa Monica, Californiawww.cooking.com

IndustryOnline Retail

Employees250

Return on Investment > Grew average open rates from 8.5% to over 40%

> Increased average click-through rates from 1.3% to 7.68%

Key Benefits > Developed a nuanced understanding of target

customer preferences

> Gained a fully repeatable and scalable multi-touch customer engagement model

> Leveraged increased customer data to drive engagement across multiple ecommerce websites

Products and Services > StrongView Message Studio

> StrongView Lifecycle Marketing Module

> Strategic Services

> Web Analytics Integration

> StrongDelivery Tools

Integrated Business Systems > Omniture

> Rapleaf

> Certona/Steelhouse

Moving from Broadcast Messaging to Precision TargetingUsing StrongView’s drag-and-drop lifecycle marketing solution, Cooking.com built automated, multi-stage, continually optimized email programs that run 24/7 to deliver timely and relevant messages to specified audiences. With strategic support from StrongView’s Marketing Services, Cooking.com launched a Thank You campaign that generated 241% greater revenue than comparable past broadcast mailings, as well as a re-engagement campaign focused on members who had not been engaged for over a year, which achieved a revenue increase of 180%.

Given the significant initial results they achieved with StrongView’s lifecycle marketing capabilities, Cooking.com was excited to move into the next phase of the program – working with StrongView Marketing Services strategists to expand into personalized campaigns based on customer behavior and preference data.

Achieving Personalized Messaging Along the Customer LifecycleAt the beginning of the engagement, Cooking.com estimated that of its millions of customers, 80% were not actively engaged. Based on that state, they developed specific goals they wanted to achieve with StrongView’s lifecycle marketing solution:

• Create a rewarding long-term experience for existing customers through an improved on-boarding process

• Develop a repeatable and scalable program to re-engage customers who are not transactionally active

• Drive increased repeat sales to online customers

Customer Analysis and SegmentationAs a first step towards achieving these goals, Cooking.com conducted a sophisticated customer analysis and segmented customers along a broad range of behavioral, demographic and psychographic variables. This provided a framework for measuring purchasing activity and capacity. During this stage, Cooking.com uncovered important differences between segments that had big implications for the design, messaging, frequency and timing of their marketing campaigns. For example, they learned that customers who have made a purchase from any online store in the Cooking.com network are at least twice as likely to purchase again from any of the in-network sites than other site visitors who have not made a past purchase.

The outcome of Cooking.com’s segmentation exercise was a series of segments based on customer characteristics and preferences, such as:

• Green Consumers–those who are far more likely to purchase organic foods, energy efficient appliances and eco-friendly brands

• Trendy Homemakers– those who are far more likely to buy the latest home accessories, subscribe to design and decorating publications and express a strong interest in cooking and recipes

• Fashionistas – those who are far more likely to buy from luxury brands and associated retailers, frequent upscale restaurants and clubs and purchase designer clothing and accessories

To provide the best possible experience, Cooking.com wanted to make sure that they understood customers’ preferences as early as possible in the customer journey. With assistance from StrongView’s Marketing Services strategists, Cooking.com designed a StrongView-powered on-boarding program that uses response analysis and attribution modeling to match product recommendations to the preferences of each specific customer psychographic category.

“Now, if we know someone is interested in Calphalon cookware, we can more easily target that group through the StrongView solution, so they’re getting much more relevant communications instead of receiving a broadcast message sent to the entire customer base.”Matt Bunn Director of Email Marketing Cooking.com

Personalizing Messaging and OffersCooking.com’s lifecycle marketing program began with a “Day 0” welcome email sent to customers upon sign-up, with a clear description of benefits and a walk-through of the different ways the customer can shop on Cooking.com.

Four days later, customers received a more focused email featuring a specific product category determined by tracking which product links the customer clicked through in the initial email. Cooking.com also used the Day 4 email to begin adjusting product recommendations based on preferences by including links to questions such as “What type of cook do you consider yourself?” Based on the response given, the customer would then receive the next appropriate email that included specific product recommendations and relevant links. Customer interactions with the third Day 8 email message were used to further refine future offers, and so on in a process of continuous optimization.

The overall flow of Cooking.com’s lifecycle marketing program was driven by a series of preference choices made by the customer that were designed to give customers an optimal messaging experience and help guide them to the right purchase point. Below is an example of what the messaging campaign looked like from the customer perspective:

Cooking.com uses click data to personalize each installment of its multi-part welcome series.

Day 0 Day 4 Day 8

ABOUT STRONGVIEWStrongView’s cross-channel marketing solutions provide enterprise marketers with the tools, services and insights required to effectively engage today’s constantly connected customers. Combining a powerful cross-channel campaign management solution with market-leading data access and analysis, StrongView’s Marketing Cloud enables marketers to understand the current context of each customer and respond in real time with relevant messages across email, mobile, social, display and web.

A champion of “Present Tense Marketing,” StrongView is committed to delivering solutions that reflect the new reality of the technology-empowered customer. Based in Redwood City, CA and backed by leading venture capital investors, StrongView has been helping global brands in retail, travel, finance, entertainment and online services overcome the limitations of other marketing platform providers for more than a decade.

For a stronger view of marketing go to www.StrongView.com, and follow us at www.twitter.com/StrongView and www.facebook.com/StrongViewInc.

StrongView Systems 1300 Island Drive, Suite 200 Redwood City, CA 94065 P 650-421-4200 F 650-421-4201

SV-M-10114Copyright © 2014 StrongView Systems, Inc. STRONGVIEW and the STRONGVIEW logo are registered trademarks in the United States, other countries or both. All Rights Reserved.

StrongView Systems UK, Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales at 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW. Reg. No. 6398867. VAT # GB 925 07 6228. Trading Address: Adelaide House, Perth Industrial Estate, Slough, Berkshire, SL1 4XX, United Kingdom.

Responsive Messaging Leads to Increased Engagement Since it began using StrongView’s lifecycle marketing capabilities, Cooking.com has seen significant improvements in their customer engagement rates.

• Average email open rates increased from 8.5% to 41.83%

• Average email click-through rates moved from 1.3% to 7.68%

• For users who indicated their preferences, the average open rate increased to 51.2% and click-through rates increased to 22.9%

• Unsubscribe requests and complaints decreased by 29%

Given the success of this program, Cooking.com is planning to expand its lifecycle marketing efforts by using historical customer behavior to execute additional campaigns such as Cart Abandonment, Reengagement, New Product Alerts and others. The long-term objective is to use StrongView to optimize engagement at each step along the customer journey by analyzing and deriving actionable insights from customer interaction data.

Cooking.com is taking the long view of the customer and their ability to meet customers’ preferences and needs. With StrongView’s Lifecycle Marketing solution, progressive profiles using both behavioral and psychographic data can be built out over a period of weeks and months to provide a massive trove of actionable information that can be used to build a truly personalized and rewarding customer experience.

“Our customer relationships and the level of engagement is at its all time strongest right now.”Matt Bunn, Director of Email Marketing, Cooking.com