I must admit, I have a soft spot in my heart for “Cyber Monday,” the Monday following Thanksgiving that is billed as the biggest online shopping day of the year. As a general rule, I think our country could use more holidays whose names sound like they came from the 1992 film “The Lawnmower Man.”

But my personal feelings aside, the Email Experience Council’s latest Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season sheds a little light on what actually happens online immediately after Black Friday. Apparently, Cyber Monday has really caught on…with email marketers.

67% of the retailers tracked by the Retail Email Blog [sent] at least one promotional email on Nov. 26. That was up from 44% of retailers the year before. The jump made Cyber Monday the most popular retail email marketing day of the year, eclipsing the day after Christmas, which was the biggest retail email day in 2006.

Of course, higher email volumes didn’t translate into higher sales this past year, as the EEC points out in its findings. Yes, Cyber Monday may be an unofficial holiday accepted in the business world, but it’s more of a marketing holiday than a shopping one. Don’t despair too much, though, because the EEC has lots of strategic ideas for retailers to improve their holiday mailing performance, including special holiday email series and e-gift cards.

And in case you were wondering, Reve News has a handy list of last year’s top holiday online shopping days so you can witness the magic of  “Whopping Web Wednesday” for yourself.

As the camera panned to the sign-waving crowd of politicos at last night’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, I was reminded of an upward trend I’ve noticed in email marketing campaigns over the last year. 

Many organizations have recently made a design statement — from Barack Obama to Banana Republic to Drugstore.com to Saks Fifth Avenue to Kia Motors to Steve Madden — in choosing the popular Gotham font in their email and advertising communications. Designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Gotham has quickly become a top choice for graphic designers needing a clean sans-serif font (i.e. no curly ends on strokes), particularly those in the retail space.

For whatever reason, it has long been the case that competing retail brands tend to use nearly identical fonts and colors in their marketing materials. If you work in cosmetics or beauty products, the odds are very high that your company uses Helvetica Light. Or if you work for a high-end department store, chances are you’ve been featuring a lot of Futura in your campaigns. 

Stay tuned for a survey on the most overused/underused fonts in email marketing…

If there’s one marketing book that has jumped off the shelves this year, it would definitely be Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational.” Written in an anecdotal tone similar to that of “Freakonomics” and “The Tipping Point,” Ariely’s book takes the reader through a series of straightforward scientific experiments to illustrate how counterintuitive our own behavior can be — and at the same time, how utterly foreseeable it is. But what makes this book extra special is that it takes the extra step of applying these concepts to our everyday actions, providing numerous “a-ha!” moments for both the marketer and consumer in all of us.

Ariely, a renowned behavioral economist, arrives at these startling revelations with a sharp wit and sense of humor that keep the reading easy, enjoyable, and digestable. Several of his discoveries are pure gold for email marketers, including his chapters on relativity and the cost of social norms.

• Say you have been promoting two products (A and B) in an email campaign, but sales of product B are lagging. How do you sell more of product B? Just offer something nearly identical to it, only slightly worse, as a third product that acts as a decoy. [Side note: If you are an identical twin and consider yourself slightly less attractive than your sibling, this chapter will convince you to never go to bars together EVER again.]
• Mixing business and pleasure is often a dangerous proposition when it comes to your customers. If you spend the time and energy trying to be a true “friend” to your customers in your emails, then don’t back it up with quality customer service, you are probably setting yourself up for disaster. [Note to self: Re-think plan to charge $159.99 for a yearly subscription to EmailResponsibly.com.]

Ariely’s findings also confirm feelings that we’ve surely all experienced at some point in our lives — that we’d probably have ordered something different at a restaurant (and enjoyed it more) if the other people at our table hadn’t ordered the same thing first, that for some reason we actually obey hokey honor codes on school exams even if we could easily get away with cheating, and of course, that no one has the courage to order a beer with balsamic vinegar in it.

As marketers, we all know the importance of segmenting our customers based on their key demographics, behaviors, attitudes, and affinities. But exactly who are these anonymous people we bucket into groups of hundreds, thousands, or even millions?

To help shed some light on what these customers look like and how they act, we proudly present “Know Your Personas,” a regular feature highlighting key customer groups to consider in your marketing strategy. Lucky for you, we have some nice data points courtesy of our friends at Experian Consumer Research, the home of Simmons.

For our first installment of Know Your Personas, we’re examining four shades of “green” customers — that is to say, segmenting your customers according to how eco-conscious they are.

Read More »