Marketing tool usage nearly doubles over previous year as Christian retailers employ ‘affordable and workable’ solution

The Parable Group announced Jan. 3 that nearly 14.1 million consumer emails were sent in 2013 by independent Christian retailers through SnapRetail—a 79% increase in emails sent over the same time period in 2012. Launched in March 2012, the Parable-SnapRetail partnership is an email and social-marketing solution for the industry with more than 115,000 Christian product images from more than 80 Christian publishers, music companies and gift companies.

“It’s exciting to see store owners realizing the potential they have for traffic growth and increased sales using SnapRetail,” said Steve Potratz, president of Parable. “It’s an easy and effective marketing solution that provides stores an affordable and workable way to engage customers through email marketing and various social media channels.”

Participating stores select ready-to-use email templates, including newsletters, special events, new arrivals, sales and holiday emails. Ready-to-send vendor emails are also available. Stores customize, schedule, send and simultaneously post emails to Facebook and Twitter. Email images can also be set for customers to pin to Pinterest. 

During the last seven months, ready-to-send email usage increased 37.4% versus the prior year, Parable reported.

“In December, nearly 50% of all SnapRetail emails sent by Christian retailers were ready-to-send emails, much to the excitement of our vendor partners whose products were featured in them,” Potratz added. 

Parable launched an email reimbursement package for ready-to-send emails within SnapRetail in October 2013. For vendors, this provides an opportunity to incentivize retailers to send their product and promotional ready-to-send emails, build brand equity and ramp up sales at the local level. For retailers, the reimbursement program rewards them for sending select ready-to-send vendor emails, which can help offset their monthly SnapRetail program fee. 

“MarketingSherpa recently found that 64% of companies planned to increase their 2013 investment in email marketing this year because email is effective in generating high-quality leads,” said Erik Ernstrom, Parable’s manager of business intelligence. “Now is the time for Christian Retailers to take advantage of SnapRetail’s easy-to-use email platform, build a strategy to connect to customers and grow their customer list size in time for Easter.”

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