July 16, 2012
Retail TouchPoints: Email Marketing Best Practices for the 2012 Holiday Season
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website.
Retailers traditionally have utilized batch-and-blast delivery strategies to ensure emails showcasing their holiday-themed campaigns are seen. Bronto Software urges retailers to have a communication plan filled with fun and intriguing messages, offers and calls-to-action to increase email opens and overall engagement.
"When you’re creating your communication plan, creative resources are always key," explained Jim Davidson, manager of marketing research, at Bronto’s recent Revenue Revolution Tour stop in New York City. "A common but big mistake is to send the same message consistently over a period of days. This strategy floods consumers’ inboxes with offers and leads to more unsubscribes and abuse complaints. When you’re increasing your message frequency, consumers will appreciate a variation in messaging, especially when you’re sharing offers."
Bronto’s 2011 Holiday Wrap-Up report revealed that retailers sent an average of two messages a day, with some merchants sending five emails within the same period, between Nov. 29, 2011 and Dec. 25, 2011. While it is tempting to send promotions and announcements such as door busters and information on holiday hours consistently during the day, retailers must "understand the thresholds of what your customer expects to receive via email," Mr. Davidson said.
It’s vital that retailers analyze unsubscribes and overall email responses to determine if they’re losing loyal customers due to email send rates," he added. "If people who really love your brand are unsubscribing to your emails, you need to reevaluate how many messages you send out."
During his presentation, Mr. Davidson shared a selection of email marketing strategies to drive click-throughs and in-store traffic. The tactics include the following:
Drive cross-channel engagement: Only two percent of brands sent an email dedicated to mobile programs during the 2011 holiday season. To drive sign-ups for SMS programs, "Likes" on Facebook and follows on Twitter, create emails with clear calls-to-action such as value proposition for signing up clear in message banners and footers.
Promote gift guides and shop-by-date strategies: Best-in-class retailers send emails highlighting must-have gifts for friends and family, as well as curated collections for specific audiences. Overall, 11 percent of merchants sent dedicated emails for gift guides, while 17 percent promoted shop-bys during the 2011 holiday season.
Explore daily deals: Only seven percent of retailers utilized daily deals last holiday season due to the risk of inbox clutter and consumers not seeing messages. At the same time, eight percent of merchants explored flash sales.
Thank shoppers for their loyalty: On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, 18 percent and 14 percent of retailers focused on sending themed, non-promotional messages to their customers.
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions: How should and shouldn’t retailers attempt to get their holiday campaign emails noticed? What type of messaging, offers or calls-to-action work best to increase email opens and overall engagement?
Poll
First of all, I am a big fan of Retail TouchPoints. There are a lot of retail outlets out there and I have observed first-hand Retail TouchPoints’s professionalism and reach.
Having said that, and at the risk of generalizing ever so slightly ;), I think the best email campaign is no email campaign. In this day and age, there are more effective ways to reach customers than an email campaign. It doesn’t matter how targeted it is, email is noise. Email annoys. Email risks discrediting your brand and offering. Find your customers on social networks and communities, moderate discussions, host webinars, publish white-papers and case studies … there are some many good ways of grabbing attention. Why use email at all?
The suggestions presented in the article are excellent. Retailers need to be judicious in sending emails to customers. Bombarding them with information won’t work. Each email needs to have a clear reason for being and should be targeted to specific consumers or consumer groups. One size definitely does not fit all. The more valuable the email to the individual, the more likely email from that merchant will be opened.
I endorse all of Ms. Fiorietta’s suggestions, especially driving cross-channel engagement. But I would also advocate using this campaign approach to build an intelligent customer database, denoting who opened, clicked and purchased. Using this information as when building the next campaign will afford the retailer the opportunity to better target and customize the messaging.
The campaign approach, and even using a decision tree platform based upon past behavior to determine who gets what and when, will bring both relevance and engagement to each message while building a learning base for future efforts.
One of the best pieces of advice in the article was to spend time analyzing the un-subscribes. The trend of e-mail in-boxes overflowing with multiple messages, often the same message over and over, draws a dangerous parallel to growth of cable TV and, more recently, the DVR, to avoid the mindless repetition of ads. Ironically, this kind of overkill can actually do serious damage to a brand, as customers become increasingly irritated with slogging through and deleting page after page of meaningless ads.
This is an outstanding topic for the 21st century retailer that has an IT department running and equipped to communicate any time, any where to one and all. Please note that these four categories were not numbered and should not be set within IT system priorities. Instead they need to be established as equally important IT marketing plans with separate measurement reports for the goals they each own to attain greater market awareness and corporate growth.
Good article with good ideas for emails that can potentially cut thru the holiday clutter. I especially like the gift guides, curated collections for specific audiences, daily deals and flash sales. And it would be really, really nice if every brand remembered to send a “Thank You and Happy Holidays” message. So simple, but something so many brands forget.
One thing that always captures my attention are emails that offer something extra, i.e., they go beyond the latest sale, discount or coupon to offer info, ideas and tips, like recipes, gift wrapping ideas, decorating tips, holiday party style guides, etc. The Container Store did a nice job of this with emails enticing the shopper to click thru to learn how to use the store’s items to create homemade gifts.
As the article notes, it’s important for the brand to know their customer, and especially so when crafting emails that convey info on improving the shopper’s lifestyle outside the shopping experience.
All good suggestions, and I’m going to respectfully disagree with those comments suggesting that retailers skip e-mails or avoid over communicating.
We have voluminous data to prove that e-mail marketing is consistently the highest ROI traffic source for B-2-C e-commerce sites.
Further, it’s almost impossible to send consumers too much e-mail. Even daily send rates (yes, that’s 365 e-mails a year) show the same 0.1% – 0.5% unsubscribe rates that monthly sends do. The bottom line is that the majority of recipients ignore most e-mails, a meaningful minority respond to e-mails by clicking through to the site, and statistic insignificant percentage unsubscribe. Which is Mr. Davidson warns against being repetitive but does not warn about frequency. The bottom line is that frequent e-mails make money for e-commerce sites.
I’d add some holiday best practices:
Personalize e-mails based on shopping carts, wish lists, past purchases, etc. (But Cross-Channel retailers shouldn’t assume abandoned shopping carts went unpurchased, as many consumers also will use the cart for pre-shopping and then visit the store to buy).
If you can’t personalize, at least segment e-mails.
Send e-mails from a person rather than a department (or worse noreply@company.com).
Test non-traditional delivery times (such as nights and weekends). Monitor when individual recipients respond to e-mails and stick with those days/times.
Make sure that e-mail are optimized for reading on mobile devices.
Offer more nuanced delivery preferences (HTML vs text, mobile vs desktop, e-mail vs. SMS), and respect them.
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First of all, I am a big fan of Retail TouchPoints. There are a lot of retail outlets out there and I have observed first-hand Retail TouchPoints’s professionalism and reach.
Having said that, and at the risk of generalizing ever so slightly ;), I think the best email campaign is no email campaign. In this day and age, there are more effective ways to reach customers than an email campaign. It doesn’t matter how targeted it is, email is noise. Email annoys. Email risks discrediting your brand and offering. Find your customers on social networks and communities, moderate discussions, host webinars, publish white-papers and case studies … there are some many good ways of grabbing attention. Why use email at all?
The suggestions presented in the article are excellent. Retailers need to be judicious in sending emails to customers. Bombarding them with information won’t work. Each email needs to have a clear reason for being and should be targeted to specific consumers or consumer groups. One size definitely does not fit all. The more valuable the email to the individual, the more likely email from that merchant will be opened.
I endorse all of Ms. Fiorietta’s suggestions, especially driving cross-channel engagement. But I would also advocate using this campaign approach to build an intelligent customer database, denoting who opened, clicked and purchased. Using this information as when building the next campaign will afford the retailer the opportunity to better target and customize the messaging.
The campaign approach, and even using a decision tree platform based upon past behavior to determine who gets what and when, will bring both relevance and engagement to each message while building a learning base for future efforts.
One of the best pieces of advice in the article was to spend time analyzing the un-subscribes. The trend of e-mail in-boxes overflowing with multiple messages, often the same message over and over, draws a dangerous parallel to growth of cable TV and, more recently, the DVR, to avoid the mindless repetition of ads. Ironically, this kind of overkill can actually do serious damage to a brand, as customers become increasingly irritated with slogging through and deleting page after page of meaningless ads.
This is an outstanding topic for the 21st century retailer that has an IT department running and equipped to communicate any time, any where to one and all. Please note that these four categories were not numbered and should not be set within IT system priorities. Instead they need to be established as equally important IT marketing plans with separate measurement reports for the goals they each own to attain greater market awareness and corporate growth.
Good article with good ideas for emails that can potentially cut thru the holiday clutter. I especially like the gift guides, curated collections for specific audiences, daily deals and flash sales. And it would be really, really nice if every brand remembered to send a “Thank You and Happy Holidays” message. So simple, but something so many brands forget.
One thing that always captures my attention are emails that offer something extra, i.e., they go beyond the latest sale, discount or coupon to offer info, ideas and tips, like recipes, gift wrapping ideas, decorating tips, holiday party style guides, etc. The Container Store did a nice job of this with emails enticing the shopper to click thru to learn how to use the store’s items to create homemade gifts.
As the article notes, it’s important for the brand to know their customer, and especially so when crafting emails that convey info on improving the shopper’s lifestyle outside the shopping experience.
All good suggestions, and I’m going to respectfully disagree with those comments suggesting that retailers skip e-mails or avoid over communicating.
We have voluminous data to prove that e-mail marketing is consistently the highest ROI traffic source for B-2-C e-commerce sites.
Further, it’s almost impossible to send consumers too much e-mail. Even daily send rates (yes, that’s 365 e-mails a year) show the same 0.1% – 0.5% unsubscribe rates that monthly sends do. The bottom line is that the majority of recipients ignore most e-mails, a meaningful minority respond to e-mails by clicking through to the site, and statistic insignificant percentage unsubscribe. Which is Mr. Davidson warns against being repetitive but does not warn about frequency. The bottom line is that frequent e-mails make money for e-commerce sites.
I’d add some holiday best practices:
Personalize e-mails based on shopping carts, wish lists, past purchases, etc. (But Cross-Channel retailers shouldn’t assume abandoned shopping carts went unpurchased, as many consumers also will use the cart for pre-shopping and then visit the store to buy).
If you can’t personalize, at least segment e-mails.
Send e-mails from a person rather than a department (or worse noreply@company.com).
Test non-traditional delivery times (such as nights and weekends). Monitor when individual recipients respond to e-mails and stick with those days/times.
Make sure that e-mail are optimized for reading on mobile devices.
Offer more nuanced delivery preferences (HTML vs text, mobile vs desktop, e-mail vs. SMS), and respect them.