The Business
ComputerGear launched in 1993 with an idea of selling funny computer-related shirts. As the product line grew to various products associated with STEM, so did its customer base. Its motto is “Celebrate science,” and it sends out catalogs to customers around the country. While it has been growing steadily, making it through the pandemic required adaptive skills and marketing. It not only survived but thrived with impressive growth in sales, thanks to Remarkety.
Adaptive marketing powered by Remarkety
Erica Branch, who became the company’s new owner in 2020, set the company on a course of growth through strategic email marketing. To achieve that goal, she turned to Remarkety.
She first used it for automated remarketing, recover abandoned carts, requests for reviews, and welcome emails. Noting the uptick in conversions from those emails, they considered how it can be used to boost sales beyond the niche of 4th quarter gifts.
Now they have a tool to engage customers who purchased from a particular category beyond the holiday shopping season. “You have to find your customer, and engage with them regularly to develop your brand and stay relevant.”
Achieving that level of communication manually would take far too much time. As the business owner, she explained, she doesn’t have an extra 20 hours a week to devote to marketing.
Remarkety relieves her of that burden, allowing her to create and send an email in just half an hour. It’s fast and easy, thanks to their adaptable template options that allow you to select promotions, modify fonts, add your own images and video, and segment for targeted messaging.
“The functionality of Remarkety is the best I have seen,” Branch declared, providing “a one-stop-shop for reaching your customers and selling products.”
Rising to the challenge of the pandemic
Once the pandemic struck, the company faced a number of challenges:
- Being able to operate at all under lockdown
- Hitting the right balance of lightness without inappropriate levity for the products to appeal to their customers
- Making sure they could fulfill orders and meet expectations for delivery
- Keeping customers connected
To tackle the first problem, they considered how to adapt to being an “essential” business. They did consider branching into hand sanitizer, gloves, and even food. Ultimately, though, they decided that even while being adaptive to the times, they should remain true to their brand by offering face coverings with fun designs on them and complemented those with a new line of funny T-shirts.
“If I need a mask to keep safe while at the grocery store or walking around the neighborhood, it might as well be funny and get someone to smile,” Branch observed.
They were also mindful, though, of keeping the tone appropriately light: “There is a fine line between making light of a situation and trying to uplift others with laughter and just being plain insensitive.”
With the products lined up, they figured they would be able to fulfill orders even with reduced staff. The next challenge, though, was getting word to the customers about what they could buy now and when they could expect delivery. Email became key to keeping customers in the loop about new products and processes as well as enhancing a feeling of connection to the brand.
A remarkable return from Remarkety
With so much depending on email, Remarkety became integral to ComputerGear’s success this year. Branch says she ramped up her email marketing this year, and the return has been an impressive 280% gain in year over year sales exclusively from Remarkety.
“ A small business can’t ask for much more during a pandemic,” she observed.
By being adaptive and capitalizing on targeted email marketing powered by Remarkety, the company did even better than business as usual under the most challenging circumstances.
