Posted by Christina Galbornetti, Director Creative Services
Tick tock, the holiday rush is about to begin and email marketers are preparing now to ensure success during the busiest time of year for retail. Hopefully, you’ve been on top of your results and reporting from the prior year so you can apply those findings to this year’s email campaigns. Identifying which emails worked best and what test variables improved performance can be paramount to your holiday success. But, no worries if you are starting from scratch because we’ve got a list of quick tips that can help you out.
1. Develop a Communication Plan
Now is the time to plot out a timeline of campaign elements that provides a basic outline to follow for upcoming campaigns. Stick with the basics:
- launch date/ day of the week
- mailing name
- promotion details
- define list segments
- possible subject lines
- measurement for success (open, clicks, conversion, revenue)
You can easily set up an Excel spreadsheet to manage all the campaign elements and results. Maintaining a thorough communication plan this year will allow you to document successes, failures and provide a baseline view for 2013.
2. Important Dates to Remember
Be mindful that your communication plan or spreadsheet needs to include all the important holidays and shipping deadlines that will affect your email planning. Mark your calendars with these important dates. Create some fun campaigns around these holidays and watch the response…
3. List Hygiene and Segmentation
With the volume influx of email during the Holiday season, it’s important to ensure that you are sending messages to a clean, engaged and targeted list. The more relevant an email communication is to the recipient, the more like they are to respond and take action.
Analyze your existing list of customers and try to reignite a relationship…use a great Welcome Back offer with a “We’ve Missed You Message” to entice them to come back to the brand and shop. If you see clicks and engagement then you know to keep mailing throughout the holiday season, if not remove them from your list.
Once you have a clean list of engaged consumers, move on to customer profiling which can help you define and acquire new customers with NEW verified acquisition data (available from V12 Group). V12’s consumer profiles and modeling can help you better define your targets so you can pinpoint interests, tailor your messages, and predict buying behaviors which will help to reduce overall opt-out rates. Visit www.v12groupinc.com for more information.
“A relevant email is a read email and drives the recipient to take a positive action (to buy) and lessens the chance for a negative action (opt-out).”
If timing permits, segmenting your data can help you better target with customized marketing messages that could improve conversion. For example, you can segment by gender and do a “Top 10 Gift List for Him/Her” OR segment customers who already purchased items in a certain category and target a message with a complimentary product. Knowing your audience well, then tailoring a better message to push a higher level of customization can boost engagement and performance.
4. Creative Content, Tips and Tricks
Design and strategy combined can help to create an effective mailing and the use of V12’s Creative Best Practices produces optimal designs for email. This is especially important for acquisition email since it may help to get your message past those pesky spam filters and improve inbox delivery. Not to mention, these small tweaks and changes to an email layout can create a better viewing experience for desktop and mobile users alike.
- Set the email width to 550-600 pixels for desktop viewing— those even numbers are more easily scaled down for mobile devices
- Pay attention to overall file size and optimize images for email (50-70k max). This helps to improve load time for mobile devices
- Use a mix of visible html text and images (aim for a 60/40 ratio)
- Use a single column layout to prevent shifting and rendering issues
- Use Alt tag text for when images are not enabled
- Keep pertinent offer information above the fold area (top 200-250 pixels)
- Use a clear call-to-action button (and clickable url links) above the fold
- Use one-line pre-header text to outline the offer to benefit mobile users
- Do not program using style sheets or lengthy coding
- Avoid outlandish guarantees or ‘spammy’ words that might trigger filters
- Avoid backgrounds with white reverse text which can be hard to read
- Use email safe fonts, avoid large fonts or red font color (OK within a small image)
- Does the landing page support the email offer? Does is have a consistent look with clear call to action? And is it mobile friendly?
5. Subject Lines
Subject lines are heavily weighted in spam scoring and directly impact open rates and campaign performance, so they should be carefully crafted. Keep in mind that the ‘from line’ and ‘subject line’ are the only elements of your email that work the hardest and need to instantly grab a reader’s attention. That is the critical moment when a decision is made to either open or delete your email message. It’s also the easiest element to change and test to improve performance.
Offer or benefit driven subject lines that are clear and compelling often do the best and keep it around 50 characters (less for mobile audiences). In the past, “Free” has been a spam trigger word but we are seeing its use is becoming more prevalent and getting better than average results, so test it out this Holiday Season. A/B splits are easy to set up with your service provider and definitely worth your time.
6. Social Media Sizzles
There is a lot of competition for the inbox during the holidays so your strategy and execution is pretty important to the overall success of your campaigns. Consumers will be rushed to scroll through a crowded inbox of offers, deals and promotions so you’ll need to stand out. There’s no doubt social media just adds value to the marketing mix and it’s one of the best ways to boost interest, engagement AND your email subscriber list.
Recent studies show e-mails containing links to share on Facebook or Twitter generated a 30% higher click-through rate than emails without them. Moreover, when e-mails included at least three different sharing options, publishers experienced a 55% higher CTR on average. (http://mashable.com/2010/06/21/social-media-email-marketing-2/)
Utilizing social and email helps create a strong relationship with your customers and may be the best link to establish and maintain 2-way communication so remember to:
(1) Use social media to grow your in-house email database and ask for that opt-in email address using contests or other fun promotions.
(2) Promote following exclusive offers within all your email communication by adding social-media headers or footers and icons to emails.
(3) Make it easy for email recipients to share your content with easily identifiable icons, links, or text that best represent the email content.
(Forward to a friend, post it to Facebook, or tweet about it)
Always make sure you are looking at social media sites, blogs, review sites, etc. to see what consumers are saying about your company, product or service and how they perceive your brand. That outsider perspective will breathe fresh life into your digital copywriting. It’s like taking the pulse of your audience and reacting with content that speaks to their perception of you. You’ll gain some insight on what makes you better and why.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the goal is to minimize stress and chaos by preparing in advance of the busy season, the more planning you do right now, the easier it will be to track your progress and make quick campaign adjustments based on consumer behaviors and external buying environments. In fact, it’s good advice to have an emergency promotion in your back pocket, just in case the numbers aren’t meeting your goals. Consumers will be more likely to delete irrelevant emails, but arm yourself with a good strategy and you can still win the email war.