Overstock.com Case Study

CUSTOMER

Overstock, ranked the second fastest growing retailer in the U.S. by STORES Magazine (published by the National Retail Federation) and the only pure-play Internet retailer to make the top 10, is an online outlet that sells discounted inventory of name brands direct to consumers. Their deliverability was good, but their messages were often delivered without links and images. An extremely sophisticated direct marketer, Overstock was looking for a means of improving click-throughs, conversions, and total revenue generated per email.

CERTIFIED EMAIL TEST

Overstock emailed 600,000 AOL customers who had purchased something within the last 6 months, and members of their Club O, who are frequent purchasers that belong to a paid-for program that provides exclusive email promotional offers. These customers were divided into two groups, a CertifiedEmail test population, and a non-certified email control group. Over the course of one month, six email campaigns totaling 3.4 million email messages, were sent to the persistent test and control groups.

Non-CertifiedEmail sample as received by the customer	CertifiedEmail sample as received by the customer.

RESULTS

The response rates for the CertifiedEmail recipients as compared to the non-certified email recipients showed the following increases:

ANALYSIS

Certifi edEmail showed a statistically significant lift across all metrics. There were two primary differences between the non-certified email messages and the CertifiedEmail messages. First, as a secure, trusted message, the CertifiedEmails were presented with links and images rendered intact by default. Second, the CertifiedEmails were presented with a unique trust icon indicating to the recipient that the message was authentic and trustworthy. As all other variables were tightly controlled, these characteristics were responsible for the positive impact on metrics. Overstock’s return on investment (ROI) was calculated to be extremely positive.

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