Ho ho ho: Best practice for holiday email marketing

As Christmas fast approaches, retailers across the country are ramping up their marketing strategies to take advantage of the seasonal hike in consumer spending. Last Christmas was hard on the retail sector, and there is no doubt that this year will also be challenging. There is more pressure than ever on brands to attract customers and drive better return on investment from campaigns.

Email marketing can play a crucial role. In Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Census, 61 percent of respondents who measure campaign effectiveness said that email marketing provides an increase in ROI of 300 percent or more. But email marketing is a science, and marketers looking to drive strong returns from their email marketing programmes this Christmas must plan their communications carefully and adopt best-practice techniques. These tips should help:

1) Plan in advance. When planning for Christmas this year, it is important to use last year’s metrics to underpin your email marketing strategies. Look at what worked well, what could be improved, and how the competition fared. Be prepared to consider traditional techniques alongside new ones such as incorporating social media into campaigns.

It is also crucial to ensure that plans are flexible enough to change in response to customer behaviour, including greater or less demand than anticipated. This means thinking about the process and resources for making speedy tactical changes to programmes based on the latest market or competitor information.

2) Resolve data-quality issues. To generate the maximum ROI from pre-Christmas pushes, you must ensure that customers’ contact data are clean, accurate, and up to date. If you wait until the last minute to review the data, it may be too late to make any significant changes to its quality.

Work throughout the remainder of summer and the early autumn to build your email subscriber lists. It should be clear at the point of subscription what value customers will get from signing up to receive your emails—the benefits could include invitations to VIP events or early notification of sales—and of course you should live up to those promises.

3) Set out the timings and frequency of your messages. Analysing website and email marketing metrics will help you determine the best days of the week and times of day to send emails to a particular audience or segments of it. Multichannel retailers that have a high volume of traffic to high-street outlets on Saturdays should email customers on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning to encourage footfall. Pure-play etailers and cataloguers might heavily promote final delivery deadlines in the run-up to Christmas.

Most consumers expect to receive more emails during the Christmas period, so increasing the frequency of communications can be effective. But ensure that every communication delivers a relevant and useful message.

4) Segment and profile your customer base. By effectively profiling and segmenting customers, you can create tailored, more-effective messages. Identify which products and keywords your target customers are looking for, and use this information to form email subject lines, search engine marketing campaigns, and promotional pushes. Search terms such as “free” may increase in popularity during Christmas; you should evaluate, however, whether they actually drive more transactions.

As well as using your own online data, research what competitors are doing. Determine which days competitors send their emails campaigns by looking for spikes in upstream traffic. Consider which websites are driving traffic to competitors’ sites and the social networks that are hosting their campaigns.

5) Keep testing. Set up a plan to test key factors before the Christmas rush hits. If there are any problems, such as emails rendering incorrectly in certain platforms, you want to find out sooner rather than later. Also analyse where the prime real estate for driving click-throughs is on emails, so that you know where primary messages should be placed for maximum impact.

6) Exploit cross-sell and upsell opportunities. One way to do so is by making more of transactional emails such as order and shipping confirmations. Change order confirmation emails to HTML, and use dynamic content to promote appropriate cross-sell products based on what has been purchased. You can also use purchase-behaviour data combined with click-through data to determine customer interests so that you can deliver relevant content and offers in email marketing campaigns via dynamic content.

7) Remarket to visitors who have abandoned their shopping basket. Reengage with website visitors who have abandoned their shopping basket before checking out. Key questions to consider when building remarketing programmes are whether to mention the specific products abandoned, the balance of customer services versus promotional messaging, and whether to offer an incentive such as free postage. (For more on this aspect of email marketing, see “How email can salvage abandoned shopping carts”.)

8) Include user ratings and reviews to increase satisfaction and loyalty. You can include user ratings and reviews, where consumers share first-hand experience of the product or service, both on your website and in email communications. “Forward to a friend” functionality, wish lists, and gift recommendations can also help grow subscriber lists, burnish your brand image, and increase revenue.

Overall, taking on board some or all of these best-practice techniques should help relieve the uncertainty and stress in the build-up to Christmas. Effective campaigns rely on a good understanding of customers, their preferences, and their buying behaviour. Plans should include a combination of tactics such as cross-sell and upsell, remarketing, and social-media tools, as well as a healthy dose of testing. Don’t be afraid to try new things, but make sure to constantly measure and benchmark the results.

In the end, the time and effort invested will pay off. Targeted communications will attract consumer attention and help your organisation to stand out in a crowded Christmas inbox.

Steve Lomax is managing director of email marketing provider Experian CheetahMail EMEA.