E-mail

With the employee turnover rate typically high in the retail industry, particularly within brick-and-mortar stores, managing the process of finding and hiring qualified individuals is a challenge for many brands. It often proves time consuming and can be expensive. Such was the dilemma facing VILLA.

Finding the right marketing mix to meet your acquisition goals can be a test-and-learn endeavor. The first thing you need to know is your audience. Where online do they spend time? It's likely your strategy will contain a mix of display advertising, social media and search engine optimization to drive direct signups on your website. Knowing where your customers spend time online will inform how much you should invest in each channel. 

The Company Store hasn't sent many flash-sale emails. In fact, among the 133 emails captured by Who's Mailing What! this year, only one recent email used the flash-sale strategy. However, The Company Store clearly did its homework.

Even in an age of Twitter posts and Instagram photos, email is still the way marketers reach the hearts — and wallets — of consumers. And that's why retailers are up in arms about Google's latest tweak to Gmail. Over the summer, the internet behemoth gradually introduced a new inbox with an assortment of folders for different types of messages, including a main inbox and ones for social networking alerts, e-commerce promotions, updates from businesses like banks and mailing list messages.

Retailers should use a hybrid layout with both responsive and scalable design to ensure consumers can interact with their email content. Responsive design adapts emails to the device subscribers are using, creating screen-proportional layouts that are visually appealing. Scalable design ensures that emails are still readable when reduced to half their size on a mobile device. Retailers can use both tactics to improve their email strategy with these tips:

Google's recent decision to pre-sort Gmail users’ messages by "primary," "social" and "promotions" tabs threw a lot of fashion brands for a loop. Email messaging is a strong mode of communication for online retailers, and now their messages are filed away immediately, relegated to third-most-important in the Gmail tab hierarchy, falling only one notch above spam. At the time of the change, a Google representative told Racked, "Gmail's new inbox is designed to help you manage email overload and take back control of your inbox."

When it comes to shopping, consumers still prefer to learn about promotions via email, and by a large margin, according to a new survey from Millward Brown Digital. After search engines, email comes in at No. 2. Furthermore, 40.6 percent of people choose email as a tool when they shop, compared to only 27.3 percent for social networking sites. Emails are more personalized, says Uyen Chand, senior analyst for retail and CPG with Millward Brown, and appeal to people because they can open them when they feel like it, on their own terms.

Earlier this week, TheOutnet.com sent an email blast to customers with the subject line, "We aren't ignoring you, promise!" The email was a response to Google Mail's recent inbox update. The new Gmail inbox automatically filters bulk mail-including marketing emails, like The Outnet's sale updates-out of the primary inbox and into a new "Promotions" tab, effectively hiding them from view. The Outnet, which is a discount fashion apparel and accessories site operated by luxury e-tailer Net-a-Porter, explains it like this

The customer acquisition strategy put in place last year by BustedTees, an online retailer of T-shirts that was started by the founders of CollegeHumor.com in 2004, is no joke. The strategy involves placing display ads across the web on targeted sites. When prospects click on the ads, a box pops up that asks for their email address in exchange for a 20 percent discount on their first order.

Experian Marketing Services, a global provider of integrated consumer insights and targeting, data quality and cross-channel marketing, today announced the release of its global holiday email study. The study includes an examination of more than 100,000 email campaigns sent by more than 1,000 brands across 10 markets, including Australia, China, France, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, between October 2012 and the end of December 2012. For many retailers, the holiday season generates the highest amount of revenue.