Recently, I had the opportunity to conduct an online interview with Mike Gundry, the President of Retail at Jerry’s Artarama. As Jerry’s Artararma is great customer of Mautive, I wanted to learn more about them as a business, their digital marketing, and of course the email marketing tools they use to help maintain relationships with their customers. His answer to my questions are below.
1. What is Jerry’s Artarama and how did it get started.
Jerry’s Artarama was founded in 1968 by Jerry Goldstein in New York. Jerry’s Artarama has become one of Americas premier source for art supplies and framing. To date Jerry’s Artarama consists of 16 retail stores, one to open later this year, and a full service website mail order division. Jerry’s offers products from around the world exclusively to their customers in the United States along with the other brands all at amazingly great prices. Jerry’s also offers full service frame shops at all stores. It is the goal for each of our stores to become the center of their local art community.
2. Who are the people you typically reach to with your business (students, teachers, men, woman, etc)
Jerry’s services artists and art aspirers from all age levels.
3. How has digital marketing changed the marketing landscape of Jerry’s Artarama’s business model?
Jerry’s utilizes email marketing and social media to reach a much broader market place. Jerry’s is able to have a much more extensive marketing campaign due to the economics of digital marketing along with the ability to make marketing decisions quickly. In years past we would have a yearly marketing plan that would include flyers, post cards, and some traditional print media. We would have to live with the plan even if it was not getting us the results we were looking for. With digital marketing we can make changes and alterations along with adding whole new concepts in a very short period of time.
4. As a business with a strong eCommerce presence, what are some of the tricks and tips you have learned about how to get customers to be repeat customers.
Even though marketing has many new tools in todays day and age, the marketing message is still the same. Customers still want why they always have wanted. They want friendly service, quality products all at a great price. To accomplish that, we create our email campaigns to offer more than just price and products, but to offer service; services like free art lessons, local art happenings, announcements of demonstrations in our stores and much more.
5. What made you choose to start using Email Marketing
Email marketing is very important to targeted markets like ours. I don’t think we even have an option do we? Email is the best and most efficient way to reach customers.
6. Are there any particular tools of email marketing that have been really useful for your marketing strategy.
That is the best part of email marketing, you can do many things and don’t have to rely on a few proven tricks. If I had to narrow to one, it would be to have limited time deals. Through email marketing you can your message to your customers at a exactly the time you want them to receive it which allows for some quick call to action marketing.
7. Are there any types of content or subject matter that you have found to be really successful with your customers in regards to email marketing.
Besides FREE, the best subject matter is specific category sale. For instance in our business we offer specials in categories like “Giant Canvas Sale”.
8. How do you see email marketing continuing to grow with your overall marketing strategy in the future?
We have all but eliminated any traditional print media. We still do some mailings, but our efforts are to get many email addresses as we can from our customers and interested people.
