20 Creative Ways to Drive Response via E-mail

Does e-mail marketing work? Yes! In fact, 39 percent of online shoppers said they bought something through a catalog after receiving e-mail, according to a study commissioned by DoubleClick. Indeed, e-mail marketing has become a critical tool in the marketer’s drive for product-specific sales and to move clearance merchandise. Other uses include: encouraging customers to visit retail stores and to shop from catalogs; rapidly collecting inexpensive market research; providing service updates; and supporting partner sales.

Following are 20 tips that can help you effectively and profitably use the e-mail medium in your multichannel marketing plan.

1. Use e-mail to alert customers that a new catalog edition is on the way. Offer a link to an online-only preview or sneak peek at the newest collection in your next catalog. Load photos for the new items onto your Web site early, and you’ll make your merchants extremely happy by getting a quick read on the new book — plus rapid sales to boot.

2. Send store coupons and circulars to your customers via e-mail. In the copy, point out key item sales and promotions.

Here’s why this is a good idea: 59 percent of consumers polled said they’ve purchased from retail stores after getting marketing e-mails, according to a study conducted by Beyond Interactive and Greenfield Online for DoubleClick. Additionally, more than 20 percent of all Internet users have redeemed a coupon online, according to e-Marketer.

So get your e-coupons flowing whenever you need to jump-start sales of a particular product or category. Test the links and add an expiration date, as all coupons get posted on Internet coupon sites almost immediately.

3. Send e-mail announcements about new store openings to customers within a reasonable geographical area. You can do this by ordering a zip-code select on your e-mail customer file.

Almost a third of all online shoppers use the store locator on click-and-brick retailers’ sites, according to Retail Forward’s E-Retail Intelligence Program. Include store-location information in the e-mails you send to customers to reinforce your offline presence.

4. Test adding a link for catalog requests in e-mails. Then evaluate if the sales from these catalogs are effective over time.

5. Allow customers to order products online and pick them up in your nearest retail store. This is a real convenience for customers ordering large or bulky items or who live in areas where home delivery is undesirable. Best Buy uses e-mail to notify online customers of in-store pick-up information.

Promote Your Financial Services

To support your private credit card initiatives, use your e-mail to make targeted offers to sign up for and drive card usage.

6. Model your best cardholders and send a targeted e-mail to customers who match those characteristics but haven’t signed up for a card. Add an offer for dollars or a percentage off their first purchases after acceptance — plus all the benefits cardholders enjoy.

7. Use e-mail to drive use of your credit card. In a recent e-mail offer, one apparel cataloger allowed cardholders to defer payments for 90 days — a particularly welcome offer to strapped customers in the current economy.

Another merchant gave a higher percentage off in a summer clearance sale to private cardholders (i.e., “Save an additional 10 percent off when you use your branded card” ). And an electronics cataloger used e-mail to successfully promote extended payment plans and warranties, boosting financial services revenues.

Seasonal Opportunities

Judicious use of coupons and time-of-need promotions can spike sales just when you need them most.

8. Use retail-like promotions. For example, try an invitation-only, private preview sale and promotions that mimic the retail calendar to drive both online and offline catalog sales.

9. Like online customers, retail customers want immediate gratification, so use your e-mails to promote in-season products. Remember the adage: If it rains, sell umbrellas!

10. Plan e-mails around the retail advertising calendar. A menswear cataloger that typically mails its Father’s Day print catalog as early as April found that sending a marketing e-mail for Father’s Day before Mother’s Day wasn’t effective, even though it coincided with the catalog drop. Online customers still were shopping for their mothers.

11. To better compete with retailers, promote your ability to deliver holiday orders in a timely fashion. If you offer late express shipping and instant, e-mailable gift certificates, send e-mails from mid-December forward touting the products that still can be ordered in time for holiday delivery.

For example, Amazon.com’s top two days for selling e-gift certificates are Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, respectively. And e-mailed communications remind customers that Amazon is a good source for last-minute gifts and e-gift certificates.

Move More Products

12. E-mail offers for coordinating products. Hewlett-Packard creates e-mail marketing campaigns based on the lifecycle of previous purchases. For example, HP knows the typical replacement period for a printer’s cartridge. Then based on the model number, when it was purchased and when HP estimates the customer will need accessories for it, the company sends an e-mail touting its cartridges.

13. Add a link (or an additional offer) to encourage customers to try another one of your brands. In this way, you can capitalize on the positive association of one of your brands to get customers to click on another. This helps turn mono-brand customers into multi-brand ones, thus increasing their lifetime value and boosting your revenue — all at very little or no additional cost.

A specialty apparel cataloger used links in e-mails to its existing apparel customers to help launch its new housewares catalog.

14. Use e-mail to move excess inventory. A home textiles cataloger enjoyed excellent results when promoting 50-percent off its already marked-down clearance items to get rid of overstock. This virtually eliminated the need to outsource to jobbers, plus it improved its recovery rate on excess merchandise.

A sporting goods cataloger sent one e-mail to its list of parents and coaches living within a four-hour drive of its warehouse to notify them of a warehouse liquidation sale, allowing them to clean out the overstock in one day.

Test the Waters

15. Use e-mail to test new products or solicit feedback from customers. Jockey tested the use of

the Web versus traditional focus groups. It made up 200 customer-ready samples of new items it was considering carrying as part of its regular line and posted those items for sale on its Web site. It got much better results than anticipated. Customers were told they were the first to try and buy.

There are several benefits to this plan. For example, market research, which used to be an expense, now becomes a profit center, because the less-popular items can be identified well before full manufacturing commitments have to be made. Since Web customers typically respond similarly to retail customers, this was an effective plan for Jockey.

16. Test offline response using e-mail. Send a carefully targeted e-mail to multichannel customers (i.e., those who shop from your catalog and Web site) inviting them to test and/or buy new products online. This ensures getting a sample that reflects your offline customer base as well as your online one.

17. Use the Web to test print cover versions and spreads. By posting PDF files of the print catalogs you want to test and including links to them in an e-mail, you can test to see which version customers prefer before you actually print your next catalog.

At Your Service

Order-status e-mails for online orders have become a common component of multichannel operations. However, their use can be expanded in creative ways.

18. Send order-status e-mails for both online and offline orders (for customers for whom you have e-mail addresses). This can help you to relay information to your customers faster, while at the same time reducing your call center’s volume of order inquiries from customers.

19. To promote a product or highlight a Web site feature for which you want to increase utilization, add marketing messages to your order-status e-mails.

20. Give online rainchecks. If a customer sees an item on-site that’s out of stock and removes it from her shopping cart, give her the option to have an automatic raincheck e-mailed to her to let her know when it does come in.

The rules and uses of e-mail are still being written, and multichannel merchants need only use their imagination to find numerous additional uses for this exciting medium.

Michele Bartam is vice president of online marketing for Brylane. She welcomes readers to send more e-mail integration ideas to her at webpractices@yahoo.com.