Leading High-End Online Jewelry Site Ice.com
Charms Customers with Targeted Emails Using Lyris ListManager

Ice.com Triples Number and Variety of Emails to Customers and
Reports Ten Percent Average Sales Amount Increase

EMERYVILLE, Calif.—(January 29, 2007)—A diamond may be forever, but once jewelry lovers discovered Ice.com, a leading online site for high-end diamond and gemstone jewelry at extremely affordable prices, customers wanted more. Ice.com relies on its opt-in email marketing program almost exclusively to market its products, and Lyris® Technologies, leading provider of email marketing solutions and a subsidiary of the J.L. Halsey Corporation (OTCBB:JLHY), was chosen by Ice.com to provide the tools it needed. In particular, Ice.com needed tools for advanced list segmentation, comprehensive analytics and reporting, and resolving deliverability issues. 

Ice.com uses Lyris ListManager to send out email campaigns, sometimes several a week, to its impressive—and growing—list of opt-in recipients. Since Ice.com began using Lyris, the Company reports a ten percent increase in the average sale amount and a tripling of the number and variety of emails it now can send using the same resources as before it partnered with Lyris. This is due to the cost savings of switching over to Lyris, which is an installed solution; Ice.com’s previous email service provider was an outsourced vendor which charged fees based on the features and functionalities used and the volume of email sent each month.

“ListManager is an extremely effective tool for implementing email campaigns and automating many key functions. Because our solution has a number of sophisticated tools and features, many customers have seen a significant increase in their marketing ROI after switching to Lyris,” notes Luis Rivera, Lyris’ CEO.

Ice.com sends email newsletters regularly to its customer base, currently almost one million subscribers. Although at one point the Company had only two segments—people who had made purchases and people who had not—as its email list grew over the years, Ice.com needed the ability to further segment its list so that the Company could send more targeted mailings to its growing subscriber base and include different levels of tracking.

According to Henry Shih, Email Marketing Manager for Ice.com, “one of the things that impressed us the most about Lyris was the flexibility of the members list.” With Lyris, Shih can add any kind of variable he wants—any custom field—to any member record. “We can then create a segment based on that variable and directly target that segment. The ease with which we are able to do this is just mind-blowing.”

Another problem that Ice found was solved by using Lyris was its ability to diagnose bounce problems. According to Shih, “with Lyris, if we discover we are having deliverability problems, I can find out immediately what the problem is because I have a live report from Lyris’ deliverability tool that tells me what my delivery rates are. I can immediately open a log that tells me which emails are bouncing, and almost instantaneously, I can see what the problem is. With Lyris, this takes at most an hour to discover. With the old system, it literally took weeks!” In a span of several weeks, this could amount to hundreds of thousands of emails that are not being delivered and quite a bit of lost revenue for Ice.com. So, the timeliness of reporting is definitely an important benefit of the Lyris system. According to Shih, “compared to any of the email systems we had before, Lyris is miles ahead.”  

About Lyris Technologies, Inc.
Founded in 1994, Lyris Technologies (http://www.lyris.com) provides leading-edge email marketing software solutions to over 5,000 customers worldwide. Our suite of products, led by our flagship product ListManager, offers powerful tools for opt-in email marketing, list management, database segmentation, and deliverability assurance. Lyris offers both hosted and software versions for publishing email campaigns, newsletters, and discussion groups. Our commitment to permission-based marketing, outstanding deliverability rates, and our extremely positive ISP relations make Lyris' solutions among the best-selling email marketing applications on the market today. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, Lyris is a subsidiary of the J.L. Halsey Corporation (OTCBB:JLHY), a leading provider of technology solutions to marketers at mid-size businesses. J.L. Halsey's other brands include ClickTracks, EmailLabs, Hot Banana, and Sparklist.