The company recently selected Silverpop, an email marketing company owned by IBM, to manage its email campaigns. With this new enterprise solution, US-Mattress will have much better visibility into email open rates on different devices. 

?We have found that mobile emails tend to have a really low conversion rate,? said Jamie Braxton, marketing manager, US-Mattress. ?The idea with mobile emails is to provide them with information, and direct them to our Mattress Research Center.? 

Mr. Braxton spoke Monday on a panel called ?Maximizing the Deliverability of Your Emails? at eTail East 2014 in Philadelphia. 

US-Mattress previously had used a smaller email campaign provider that did not offer reports as content-rich as those provided by Silverpop, Mr. Braxton said. Now the company will be able to see campaign reports that are much more rich in terms of the success rates of its email campaigns, including what devices were used to open the messages. 

Being able to segment email messages to different audiences is key, Mr. Braxton said. Having feedback about email open rates on different devices could help it better target its messages to those users. 

?The chances that a customers is going to buy a $2,000 mattress using a smartphone are slim to none,? Mr. Braxton said. 

He said the goal is to direct mobile users to the Mattress Research Center, which a sub-site at US-Mattress.com that offers advice about buying mattresses, mattress care and other information. It is also important for marketers to make sure that their websites are mobile-optimized, said Harsha Krothapalli, manager of CRM applications at Macy?s. 

He said Macy?s has been focusing a lot on making sure that it is sending the right messages to the right customers at the right time in its email campaigns. 

?We try to send the right content that people want, so that they will open it,? he said. ?We find that engagement is a challenge. We get a lot of new customers initially, but then engagement falls off.? 

He said Macy?s is seeking to become more customer-focused in its marketing messages, rather than event-focused. The retailer has been very active in its mobile strategy as well. 

Macy?s has embraced mobile in a number of ways to better meet customers? needs, from its partnership with mobile shopping app shopkick and the use of in-store beacons to leveraging augmented reality and image recognition. 

Additionally, the retailer has a strong presence in mobile advertising and a robust mobile application and Web presence (see story). 

Also speaking on the panel, Dave Sierk, commercial email manager at Dell, said it is impossible to keep up with all of the changes that internet service providers are constantly making to filter emails from marketers to their customers. The most marketers can do is make sure they are doing as much upfront from a technology as possible to make sure their email messaging conforms with requirements. 

Having more knowledge about campaign metrics should help US-Mattress drive better success with its email marketing efforts and to segments mobile users more effectively. 

?Now that we have and enterprise level service provider, we see a lot more data,? Mr. Braxton said. ?It is an eye opener, and going forward it will allow us to be a lot more educated about our messaging and segmentation.?