The Retailer's Source for Content & Community
Think it’s too late to launch an online campaign to drive sales this Memorial Day weekend? Think again! With Memorial Day less than two weeks away, now is the time to really hunker down and make sure your campaigns are ready for the first long weekend of the summer!
The top online retailers sent each of their subscribers 3.0 promotional emails on average during the week ending May 13. That’s down 10 percent week-over-week and 8 percent from where it was four weeks ago, but up 10 percent year-over-year.
Email is absolutely not dead! However, commoditized messaging is out. Consumers value and want to be communicated via relevant, intelligent and innovative emails.
Earth Day and Mother’s Day messaging has peaked. Because of competition from a late Easter, Mother’s Day messaging is down 33 percent compared to 2009. Mother’s Day messaging should rebound in the next two weeks, however, appearing in more than 30 percent of retail emails.
Predictive analytics can allow you to best find who you should be contacting, what should you be offering, when to make the offer and how to make the offer for optimum results.
Social media plays a much smaller role in driving traffic to retail websites than email marketing and search during the holiday season, according to ForeSee Results. Having watched in recent years as video calls to action disappear every November, I'm not surprised. Consumers are just too busy to participate in time-intensive social media campaigns, just like they're too busy to watch video content. However, social media does have a role to play in email messaging during the holiday season
Cross-channel costume jewelry retailer PalmBeach Jewelry acquired thousands of email subscribers prior to the busy holiday shopping season thanks to a series of email sign-up ads it ran on targeted websites last summer.
Email marketing is alive and well — look in your inbox if you don’t believe it. Promotional emails sent by online retailers hit an all-time high in 2010, according to Responsys Inc.
To start, implement an email preference center to make your emails more relevant to your audience. In my mind, this is a must-have adjunct to your email program. It allows your subscribers to update their personal information, change frequency schedules and even select what content they'd like to receive from you. All this is accomplished by allowing them to link directly to a preference center from your email. Typically, marketers include this link as one of the choices in their email's footer.
"Social and email are converging channels," said Ed Henrich, Senior Vice President of Professional Services at Responsys. "Share-with-your-network and community links are a significant part of that convergence at the moment, but someday soon marketers will be able to talk to individuals on Facebook just like they do via email now -- personalized one-to-one."
