Gift registry rei

Byline: BETH NEGUS VIVEIROS

This isn't your mother's bridal registry.

That is, it isn't...unless she was ahead of her time and particularly handy.

Years ago, wedding registries typically consisted mostly of housewares. Now, brides and grooms can sign up for tools to actually build and repair the home to house those wares.

The Home Depot debuted an online gift registry in late March, moving into an area normally associated with thin-stemmed wine glasses, sterling flatware and the like.

Direct talked recently with Shelley Nandkeolyar, vice president of interactive marketing and e-business for the Atlanta retailer, about the new online registry and how Home Depot is integrating its Web promotions into the retail environment and vice versa.

Prior to joining Home Depot, Nandkeolyar was with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, running the catalog operation and overseeing e-commerce. Before that, he was with Williams-Sonoma Inc., where he was in charge of the e-business operation and started online registries for the company's family of brands, including Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and Pottery Barn Kids. His varied career also includes five years at Levi's in merchandising and retail, as well as time in the packaged goods industry (working with Procter & Gamble and Unilever) and in communications, with DDB Needham and SSC&B Lintas.

"It's a great time - multichannel retailing is becoming more of an accepted consumer way of purchasing," he said. "Typically, consumers are researching online and then going in stores, or seeing something in a store and coming back and buying it online or by phone. The channels are working much more synergistically and there's a broader understanding of how each can complement the other from an organizational perspective."

DIRECT: Was the registry something consumers had been requesting?

NANDKEOLYAR: Yes. If you look back at the number of searches on our site last year, there were over 70,000 for gift registries. So we felt it was one of those things we should be thinking about.

DIRECT: Do you think it has to do with the trend of couples getting married later in life and not needing more traditional registry items like dishes or glassware?

NANDKEOLYAR: Yes, I think people are waiting longer or getting married for a second time, or they are combining two houses. Also, a lot of people are broadening out from the traditional areas of china and the kitchen and thinking about making home improvements. When I first got into registries, I realized REI was doing a big registry business. People were registering in the traditional Federated-type stores or Williams-Sonomas, and also registering for camping and hiking equipment. We're in the home space, and it's just a natural extension for them to consider things from us.

DIRECT: What are your most popular items so far?

NANDKEOLYAR: Our No. 1 registry item for the past week was a DeWalt 18-volt hammer drill/circular saw/reciprocating saw/floodlight combo kit. A 12-inch sliding compound miter saw was No. 2. And interestingly, people are registering for flooring, too. It covers the gamut.

DIRECT: Are people registering for other occasions besides weddings?

NANDKEOLYAR: Over time, I think weddings will be the biggest [category]. But we've been marketing Father's Day aggressively as well. As of [late April], we've had more than 20,000 registries in since we launched. They're spread out - about 5,200 are wedding, 6,500 are Father's Day, housewarming is about 5,500 and Mother's Day is about 1,000. And then there's a couple of other things like showers as well.

At this point, the online registries are separate from the retail stores. Our goal over time is to integrate the two; its something we'll look at next year to pursue.

DIRECT: Are you doing any offline promotion of the registry?

NANDKEOLYAR: It's integrated into our catalog, and eventually it will be integrated into our circulars. We're certainly doing a lot of e-mail marketing behind it, a lot of online promotion too.

We [mail] in excess of 3 million catalogs, based on seasonality and what we're promoting. We also have store circulars that go out as frequently as twice a month. We're trying to make sure that more and more of what we're presenting to the customer is a single message. You'll find that over time, we'll be putting a lot more of our direct messaging in more traditional outreaches from the company, like print advertising and circulars.

DIRECT: Who is the typical Home Depot customer?

NANDKEOLYAR: We segment customers into different groups, focusing most on our do-it-yourself home perfecters. These are the people who like to do things themselves and always have two or three projects on the go. We think they have the most involvement with the brand. We also target the do-it-for-me group, which is people who like to get things done around the home and are constantly renovating but may not necessarily be doing it themselves. [The customer base] is split pretty much equally between men and women.

DIRECT: Aside from the gift registry, do you encourage people to register on the site?

NANDKEOLYAR: We do. I believe e-mail marketing is one of our bigger opportunities. We have a house file in excess of 1 million people who have opted in, but our goals are to build it aggressively this year.

DIRECT: Do you see e-mail as a sales or retention tool?

NANDKEOLYAR: A bit of both. We use it to promote items. We use to let people know about projects they might consider and disseminate know-how. Shortly, we'll be launching new interest-based e-mails [for topics] like gardening. It's a tool that helps us keep people informed about the brand. I see it taking on a bigger role in the future. I see it as an opportunity to get localized promotions as well as national promotions in place. We can have people register with their local store in mind, and create a local customer base that we can then direct local store-created communications to.

DIRECT: Do any of the local stores maintain their own databases?

NANDKEOLYAR: No, and we'd probably never let them because there's so much opportunity to do it on a global scale. What we would do is have flags on the database that tie [customers] to a local store, so the local manager can say 'Hey, for my best customers I want to [stay open] an hour [late] on a Sunday night and [have] a clinic.' We could send out a message and see how many people opt in and design an evening appropriately.

DIRECT: Is search-engine marketing a big part of your online strategy?

NANDKEOLYAR: Yes, both search and paid inclusion. We do quite a bit there. It's an efficient way to be online and be in the forefront of somebody looking for something. That's the Yellow Pages application of being online, I think.

DIRECT: You must purchase a tremendous amount of keywords.

NANDKEOLYAR: I think it's in the tens of thousands. It's a challenge, because as you get more granular with search keywords, the cost becomes less, because not everyone is bidding on them. And its closer to the purchase, because they're more detailed about the question. If you go down the pipeline and look at words that are very specific, you know the customer is about to pull the trigger. So the ROI is better.

DIRECT: What challenges have you seen in moving Home Depot toward a multichannel approach?

NANDKEOLYAR: The easy thing to do is create synergy around your messaging and your visual and your creative. It's relatively easy to get the whole team to send out promotions on the same products in all three channels. For example, if you looked at our holiday program last year, every piece of creative we had - whether it was point of sale - or the store circular or the catalog - we had the same visual themes. So from a customer perspective, it was one great message.

The harder nut to crack is the integration of all the technologies and the supporting transactional capabilities. It's what we talked about earlier, to have an integrated strategy between the store and online, for us to be able to market through the catalog and then for someone to be able to buy in the store, for us to be able to close the loop. The ones who will win in the end will be those who fully integrate, where the product is the same, the offer is the same. Regardless of the contact point, they're able to treat the customer in a uniform way. That's what our goal is.

DIRECT: Are you doing a lot of tracking to see who your multichannel shoppers are?

NANDKEOLYAR: It's difficult to do discreet tracking, but what we do know is that we get over a million unique visitors per week [online], and a lot of them are researching things before a visit to a store on the weekend. They're developing their projects and their shopping lists side by side. And the Web can be a really good resource for them in that pursuit.