DirtDevil.com optimizes transactional emails with Campaign

Royal Appliance Manufacturing Co. introduced Dirt Devil hand-vacuums in 1984 and has since grown the brand to become Royal's signature product line, enjoying approximately 98 percent brand name awareness.

Dirt Devil builds brand loyalty for its line of floor care products and poweful vacuums with strong consumer satisfaction, assisted by its website at DirtDevil.com using a unique, product-based email marketing strategy driven in part by Campaign Enterprise email marketing software.

DirtDevil.com emails are sent automatically to people who've signed up on the website— customers who've registered product warranties or who've bought Dirt Devil products or accessories and are notified via email confirmation when their items are outbound. "We also use Campaign to drive the 'tell-a-friend' function of the website, to email reminders for things like new sweepstakes, or when we run a 'send an e-card feature,'" said Michael Crowdes, the interactive marketing and eCommerce manager for DirtDevil.com

Campaign Enterprise runs these automated functions as well as drives the response emails sent out when shoppers register at the website. It's all consumer-based, but a unique mix of e-marketing and transactional emails, Crowdes said.

Challenge: Daily automated emailing from existing database
Campaign is used for transactional emails because those are a daily occurrence, Crowdes said. DirtDevil.com has several hundred people registering on the website each week, all which require responses, and has occasional outbound email campaigns going to opt-in customers, usually numbering over 120,000.

Dirt Devil's automated transactional emails are an easy set up—including message scheduling and establishing recurring emails—using Campaign Enterprise. "Being able to schedule recurring emails was probably the second most important thing we were looking for in an email software solution," Crowdes said.

The most important feature for DirtDevil.com was the software interacting directly with the existing Dirt Devil customer database, without requiring a complete importation of customer data into the program. "One thing I don’t have time for is reconciling two separate lists for things like opt-outs and other tracking," Crowdes said. "It would be impossible to do anything else if users from the site were registering product and we had to answer each one with emails by hand."

"I'd have to do that through JavaScript if the email software were not able to directly interact with the database," he said. "It was good fortune to find Campaign online… our criteria is such that the email solution is something we own, because we're not big fans of ASP solutions in general, particularly for something like this."

Solution: Confirming customer trends
Campaign's automation and its ability to integrate with not one but two of Dirt Devil's customer databases—customer information is stored in a SQL database and certain shipping notifications use Oracle—allows Crowdes to focus on other aspects of the interactive customer experience without having to constantly monitor customer transactional email.

"I do look at a couple of top-line metrics," Crowdes said. "If those are off—say nobody has confirmed a product registration all afternoon—then I will wonder if something has happened… but that's never happened, and I just don’t think about these things in general because of the software's automation."

Direct interaction with Dirt Devil's customer databases mean automated scheduling of email product offers can be set in tandem with print campaigns such as circulars in Sunday papers. Near real time updates of unsubscribes and email bounces keep customer data clean and the online interaction positive.

The value of tracking email from Campaign Enterprise is really in understanding the customer list better, Crowdes said, sometimes more than the recorded results.

Dirt Devil looks at analytical data, like the propensity for someone to open an email based on the amount of time they have been on their list. "The people who've engaged you most recently are the ones who are most likely going to engage you again. The people who've been on our list for a year or two years, their open rate is way down." Additionally, email open rates from specific states may fluctuate in strange ways, or open rates tracked by individual ISPs can tell Crowdes and his team if there are any spam issues.

It's nice to have these trends confirmed with Campaign, Crowdes said.

Results: Campaign for sharp analytics
DirtDevil.com gauges the success of an email campaign from the analytics side, using a robust program called WebTrends and setting it up to specifically track the web traffic coming in from an email campaign. Analytical measurement ability is then already in place to track the email campaign—including the resulting sales, which Crowdes calls the 'gold standard.'

"You're limiting yourself as an interactive marketer if you have no understanding of the technology that's driving all your communications," Crowdes said. "For some folks that means understanding print, for some that means understanding broadcast… for us, it means understanding databases, protocols and all of those things."

About Royal Appliance Manufacturing
Royal Appliance Manufacturing Co., headquartered in Glenwillow, Ohio, develops, assembles and markets a full line of floor care products for home and commercial use under the Dirt Devil and Royal brand names. Company information can be found at http://www.royalappliance.com and product information is at http://www.dirtdevil.com.

About Arial Software
Founded in 1993, Arial Software LLC is widely considered the industry leader in comprehensive software designed exclusively for relationship marketing through personalized email messaging. Arial’s mission is to be a universal provider of software tools to automate, personalize and measure meaningful email communications.

If you are interested in a Campaign Enterprise email best practices case study, contact the Arial Software Media & Press Relations department here.