E-mail

Some e-commerce marketers are having a challenging holiday season, and they blame Google for it. A change to Gmail that relegated retailers’ emails to a separate inbox for promotions has had a big effect during the busiest shopping period of the year, according to three services that manage mass emails. And another change to Gmail, involving the way it shows images in messages, made it harder for retailers to track who opens their emails. Google says it made the changes to improve the service for users, and that the changes could also be advantageous to marketers. 

Christmas 2013 shaped up as the biggest challenge ever for everyone working anywhere within the retail supply chain and logistics world. The number of gifts bought from retailers — both online and in brick-and-mortar stores — will probably hit an all-time record. Yet, because of a quirk in the calendar this year, the holiday shopping season in the U.S. is as short as it possibly can be — 26 days, down nearly a week from 32 days last year.

U.S. shoppers made Cyber Monday the biggest online shopping day in history with a 20.6 percent increase in online sales, according to the latest cloud-based analytics findings from IBM. Mobile sales led the way, exceeding 17 percent of total online sales, an increase of 55.4 percent year-over-year. Cyber Monday also capped the highest five-day online sales period on record — from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday — which grew 16.5 percent over the same period in 2012. 

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.