Happy Be a Millionaire Day! Leveraging ‘Special Days’ for Creative Email Campaigns
1. "Pi(e) Day" campaign, King Arthur Flour, Tracy Taylor, senior web producer, email and operations
Background: "We've done several one-day, ‘it's a cool date on the calendar’ emails, such as a 12/12/12 campaign for 12 cents shipping on a $12 order. Those promotions were last-minute add-ins and have earned the nickname "spikers" because we see huge spikes in sales during the promo day."
Creation process: "The Pi(e) Day email idea came from one person, and the rest of the team jumped on board. We did have a little more planning time with Pi(e) Day than other spikers.
"Like all of our email creative, we handed the idea over to our web designer, who designs all our emails, and he came up with the cool animation idea for the email."
Back-end support: "The setup of the promo was extremely easy — not any different than previous discounted shipping offers. We gave a heads-up to our warehouse and call-center teams. The supervisors of those teams scheduled extra support during that time."
Email deployment: "We planned this promotion to run for 36 hours. The first email was sent at noon on March 13, the day before Pi(e) Day. This email was sent to our full marketing list.
"The ‘last chance’ second email was sent the morning of March 14 to our most active email customers. We've found that the last-chance email brings our biggest sales. It seems to be that sense of urgency.
"Like most of our spikers, we announced an email-only special coming up via Facebook: If you don't receive our email, you may want to sign up … "
Results: "The Pi(e) Day promotion was our highest revenue-generating promotion so far this calendar year, about 19 percent higher than our second highest."
2. "St. Patrick's Day 20 percent off Everything Green" Campaign, ZAGG, Jessica Andreason, email marketing manager
Background: "When I came up with the St. Patrick's Day promo, I was trying to think of a fun promotion — something different from anything we had done before.
"I also wanted to push some products that not all of our customers are aware of. For example, we put iFrogz products on ZAGG.com, and not all ZAGG customers are aware of what iFrogz has to offer. (Editor's note: iFrogz is a brand of smartphone cases and products that ZAGG acquired in 2011.)
"I looked to see how many green products we could offer and confirmed that we had enough SKUs and enough inventory for it to be a potentially successful promotion."
Creation process: "The development process was actually relatively easier than most of our promotions. Our design team designed and built the landing page, and our development team added the SKUs to the page and discounted them in our system."
Email deployment: "We didn't test anything new on this promotion, other than the promotion itself.
"We sent an email on March 4 with the idea that people would get their green accessories (cases, earbuds, etc.) in time for St. Patrick's Day. We sent a second email on March 8 to those who didn't open the first email. These follow-up emails are successful for us, and we send them with almost every campaign we do.
"We also had a banner on our homepage and promoted it through some of our social media channels (Facebook and Twitter)."
Results: "We didn't see a huge increase in revenue over our regular emails because we included many lower-priced items in this promotion, but we did see that several of the products were selling as much as 10 times as many as they had been previously.
"Also, quantity sold has increased since the promotion. That is, we're selling some products two times to four times more than before the promotion.
"Conversion rates from the homepage banner were on the higher end, but not significantly higher than others we've done. We also saw an average response from our social media efforts compared to other promotions. While this isn't an exciting clear winner, it proved that these types of promotions are of as much interest to our subscribers as our others."