Market Focus: Reaching U.S. Jewelry Buyers

• In 2014, U.S. fine jewelry and watch sales exceeded $78 billion, of which $68.8 billion was non-watch related. This doesn’t include the billions spent annually on “fashion” jewelry.
• The average U.S. household spends just over $600 per year on fine jewelry and watches.
• Nearly 25 percent of fine jewelry purchases in the U.S. take place in the November to December holiday season.

So how can jewelry marketers cash in on this massive market? One of the more efficient and high-impact methods of reaching these consumers is through direct-marketing: namely via third-party email, direct mail and, in some cases, phone. These tactics provide marketers with a winning combination of audience-selection benefits: exceptional precision to target exactly the right individual, the ability to test at low volumes with a low initial financial investment, and the option to roll out at high volumes if a given set of messaging, creative and audience is working.

Direct marketing — accessing third-party email audiences in particular — also has the benefit of being one of the most legitimately measurable media channels available. It offers immediate, objective and specific response-rate tracking and reporting — something marketers increasingly value in today’s omnichannel, fraud-laden, attribution-focused marketing world.

That’s the good news. The challenge, at least in the U.S., is finding exactly which audience sources are the best choices for a given campaign. This can be an intimidating and time-consuming process, since there are more than 30,000 separate direct-marketing audience sources and 20,000 B-to-B audience sources in the U.S.

Below is a high-level summary of the 64 available audiences of jewelry buyers, developed by Infocore’s Audience Analyst team. The analysts identified 17 subcategories into which relevant jewelry-buying consumer audiences can be classified for use by jewelry-selling marketers.

Each category contains between two and 43 separate audiences, as quantified in the bar graphs below. The largest audience within each category is referenced on the far right table (“Maximum Audience Size”) which speaks to the maximum number of individuals reachable in the largest audience in a category.

As you’d expect, many U.S. jewelry buyers fall into more than one category. Fashion jewelry buyers are also sometimes knockoff jewelry buyers, etc. As such, note that these categories and quantities are not mutually exclusive — thus the total quantities do include overlap.

What marketers like about audiences like this is that they can choose their targets based on real, hard data regarding jewelry products they’ve shopped for or purchased in the past, or have indicated they’ll be purchasing in the future. And to further segment their audience selection, marketers can refine their choices and elect to only reach males or females, or those in very specific age groups, with certain net worth or household income ranges, or by channel.

Execution

Like any industry, it pays to work with experts and professional buyers who understand the nature of these audience sources and, through experience, how to discern those that may be ideal for a given campaign. This is especially important given the vastness and complexity of the U.S. data market.

This kind of high-quality data is typically priced on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis. The CPM varies from $100 to $300, depending on the volume of records being acquired, the precision of the selection criteria and the contact media being used — e.g., postal records are less expensive than email records.
And for those of you wondering whether it’s legally permissible to send prospecting emails to people who haven’t already opted in to receive your messages, fear not. This third-party email approach was specifically designed to lawfully reach only consumers who have agreed to receive messages from trusted third-party partners.

To get the full, free U.S. Jewelry Buyers Audience report, contact: USJewelry BuyersReport@infocore.com.