Challenge / Goal
Over six million students and faculty members from more than 800 campuses nationwide rely on Barnes & Noble College for their academic needs. More than just a traditional campus bookstore, Barnes & Noble College delivers an unrivaled retail and digital education experience. With so many audiences across different schools, time zones and states, Barnes & Noble College wanted to create a best-in-class email marketing program to improve personalization and performance.
Solution
With a track record of successful CRM applications, Bridgenext (formerly DEFINITION 6) was quick to design a highly personalized and dynamic email program, one that enabled Barnes & Noble College to tailor each message to every campus and segmented audience.
Tapping into localized on-campus content and an automated email cadence, this strategic approach was executed across a national platform, producing consistently higher click-through and conversion rates. Our team also overhauled and rebuilt more than 50 new email templates to match the newly migrated bncollege.com.
Keeping the full customer experience top of mind, we expanded our strategy by adding SMS to the marketing mix. We’re making Salesforce Marketing Cloud the center of excellence for all Barnes & Noble College messaging.
Our team now distributes over one billion emails every year to Barnes & Noble College’s growing database of students, parents and alumni. In addition to email-specific consultation, reporting and analytics, our team implemented segmentation logic to microtarget specific parties with key messages.
Results
Bringing all of Barnes & Noble College’s subscribers together under one digital roof has grown engagement to six million students across 800+ retail stores. With improved personalization and automation, click-through rates have increased by 70%, with improved conversions.
