Asset Marketing Services — Multi-Brand Ecommerce & Email Strategy

The Origin Story

This engagement started with a competitor. I was driving paid-search and ecommerce strategy for a direct rival in the collectibles and precious metals space — and the results were strong enough that Asset Marketing Services (AMS) acquired that company specifically to bring me in to rebuild their entire digital operation.

AMS was the dominant player in the space, operating three distinct consumer brands: GovMint (government-minted coins), NewYorkMint (precious metals and bullion), and Stauer (luxury goods and jewelry). Combined, they held a sizable chunk of the collectibles and precious metals market — but they were running on fragmented ecommerce and email infrastructure with no unified lifecycle strategy, siloed customer databases, and a cost structure that hadn’t been challenged in years.

The mandate: rebuild the platforms, unify the data, and turn the email and search channels into a reliable revenue engine.

The Problem

Three brands. Three separate customer databases. Three separate email systems. An ecommerce platform that had been patched rather than architected. No integrated lifecycle strategy across the customer journey. And a $400K+ annual overpayment sitting inside the email vendor contract that nobody had looked hard enough at to find.

The fragmentation meant customers moved between brands — which happened frequently in the collectibles world — without any recognition or continuity. Automation that should have fired didn’t. Revenue that should have been captured from existing buyers was leaking into inactivity.

The technical debt wasn’t just a cost problem. It was a competitive problem. A well-integrated platform, a clean data model, and a disciplined lifecycle program would compound over time. AMS had the customer base to make that compound growth significant — they just needed the infrastructure to support it.

The Work

Vendor Selection and Cost Recovery

The first major initiative was a comprehensive email vendor selection process across 500+ strategic requirements — covering deliverability infrastructure, segmentation capabilities, automation triggers, API flexibility, and integration depth with Magento and the AMS ERP stack.

During that process, I identified $400K in annual cost savings — a gap between what AMS was paying and what the market actually supported for their volume and requirements. The new contract was negotiated on terms that reflected that analysis. AMS received the Electrum Award for this engagement. I received it with them.

Platform Redevelopment and Database Integration

The ecommerce platform was redeveloped and the customer database was rebuilt with a unified schema capable of holding all three brands under one data architecture. That meant migrating 493K customers and integrating six separate databases: email, analytics, ecommerce (Magento), ERP, CRM, and the legacy systems from the acquired competitor.

Clean data is the prerequisite for everything else. Before the migration, running a cross-brand lifecycle campaign was operationally impossible — the data didn’t connect. After the migration, it was a query and a send.

Lifecycle Automation and Email Strategy

With the platforms unified and the data clean, I built out the lifecycle automation and campaign architecture:

• Re-mail strategy: systematically re-engaging lapsed buyers with sequenced, segmented messaging rather than batch sends. This category alone contributed meaningfully to the revenue recovery.
• Upsell strategy: cross-brand offers and product recommendations triggered by purchase behavior — the kind of automation that’s table stakes now but required careful data modeling and platform configuration in 2010–2013.
• Automated lifecycle campaigns: triggered email programs across the full customer journey — welcome series, cart abandonment, purchase follow-up, lapse recovery, anniversary programs.

The results: email revenue up 43%, email orders up 51%. Email production costs down 50% while deployments increased 33%. That’s a more productive, cheaper, higher-output operation — achieved by architectural decisions, not more headcount.

Paid Search and Organic

In parallel with the email work, I managed paid-search campaigns across the brand portfolio. Results: +43% traffic and revenue, +36% orders, at -37% cost. The inverse relationship between volume and cost is the signal here — the campaigns got more efficient as the targeting and negative keyword discipline improved.

Ecommerce platform SEO improvements delivered a 42% increase in organic search traffic. The platform rebuild wasn’t just a data migration — it was an opportunity to fix the structural SEO issues that had been accumulating for years.

The full ecommerce redevelopment was delivered 15% under budget.

The Business Outcome

Over the engagement:

• Doubled new customer counts across the portfolio
• +29% increase in customer lifetime value
• $1M+ annual revenue attributed to the re-mail and upsell strategies
• A competitor was acquired in part because the competitive pressure from the work I was doing for that competitor became a threat AMS chose to eliminate by buying it

The last item is the clearest signal of what the work actually accomplished: it was visible enough from the outside to drive an acquisition decision.

What I’d Do Differently

The database integration work would benefit from a more disciplined schema-first approach before any data migration begins. In practice, the six-database integration required several rounds of field mapping and reconciliation that could have been compressed with a tighter discovery process upfront. The platforms were integrated successfully, but the sequencing added friction that a better upfront data model would have avoided.

The vendor selection process was thorough — but 500+ requirements is also a signal that the requirements process itself could have been structured more tightly. The right number of requirements for a vendor selection is the smallest number that actually differentiates the options. Getting there faster is a skill I’ve refined in every engagement since.