Just in time for the holidays, our friends at Experian Marketing Services have produced a valuable new research report packed with useful tips and insight for maximizing holiday marketing strategies this year. So what do we expect to see this holiday season in respect to the email marketing industry’s performance? The 2009 holiday marketer: Benchmark and trend report has some interesting points well worth your consideration, especially for all of you email marketers out there looking to gain an edge on the competition this winter.

Taking a look at the data from the report, there are a number of relevant tidbits that merit a quick shout-out:

• Email’s “eco-friendly” reputation may not hold as much sway with environmentally-conscious customers as you thought, so don’t cancel the print catalogs just yet.
  “Surprising to many, Behavioral Greens, which are the group of consumers that are most green aware according to Experian Simmons, account for nearly half of all catalog purchases.”
• Shorter really is sweeter when it comes to email subject lines during the holidays.
  “All industries with the exception of consumer products and services experienced the highest open rates when using subject lines of 25 characters or less last year.”

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Crate & Barrel certainly seems to have the bases covered when it comes to implementing product ratings and reviews into their customer lifecycle program – both online and offline. Not only do they send post-purchase emails encouraging the customer to submit user reviews of their products, but they also close the loop by accompanying their shipped products with printed reminders to go online and post a review.

The emails are particularly well-done and incoporate a number of ratings and reviews best practices. First and foremost, the emails are dynamically populated with images and links to each individual product page. This attention to detail makes for a seamless transition between email and eCommerce sites. It also helps the user save time by not having to search the Crate & Barrel site for products that they’ve already bought, or spend time racking their brain to remember every item they purchased.

Equally impressive, Crate’s sister brand, CB2, drives traffic to ratings and reviews using offline methods of communication. As you can see from the accompanying photo, each order from CB2 comes with a little printed postcard informing customers where and how they can review their new products online. It’s a simple, clear and friendly way of driving customer response across channels.
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Share-with-your-network (SWYN) is a relatively new phenomenon in the email marketing space. SWYN includes links to social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg etc. Some email pundits believe that SWYN is slowly but surely putting an end to forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) functionality in email. I personally don’t believe this is the case. What is clear so far is that forward-to-a-friend remains a fixture among most email marketing campaigns.

The email marketing agency Smith-Harmon found the following in their report FTAF vs. SWYN – The State of Email Sharing:

“There’s been some murmuring in the industry about the death of forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) lately because of the emergence of share-with-your-network (SWYN) functionality. Unlike FTAF, which is generally one-to-one sharing, SWYN allows subscribers to share an email’s content with all their friends on a social network. Shown to be considerably more viral than FTAF, SWYN also avoids entanglements with CAN-SPAM rules. Despite all those advantages, FTAF enjoys a four-to-one adoption rate over SWYN among the top online retailers. While only 12% of retailers use SWYN, 48% use FTAF—and FTAF adoption is up from 44% in 2006.”

Among retailers using individual SWYN links, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular. MySpace and Digg were the third and fourth most popular, with Delicious, ThisNext and StyleHive seeing minimal usage.

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Free shipping is a vital topic of consideration for most businesses, as it often involves the business itself incurring the associated, and often expensive distribution cost. To help you decide if free shipping offers are right for your organization, Experian CheetahMail has produced a new white paper exploring the issues related to free shipping.

As part of our research for this white paper, we conducted a study posing the following questions to email marketers:

• Are more companies deploying free shipping emails?
  On average, about 50% of mailers were offering free shipping in Q1 2009, representing a slight increase from the 48% we saw a year earlier. This percentage rose significantly in the 4th quarter of 2008, with some 60 to 65% of mailers using a free shipping offer for holiday sales.

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I went to a great low-key concert the other night and saw a clever, unconventional email acquisition strategy in action. As my friends and I were eating dinner waiting for the show to start, we were handed a simple song request flyer. You could immediately see people getting excited over the idea – a chance to have a favorite song played and to ask the artist any question they chose. The added touch, however, was how these flyers were to be sent up to the stage via paper airplane. The only request from the artist was to submit your name and email, interestingly enough.

After the first few songs, the artist in her own sarcastic yet humble way asked, “so… any requests?” Then came the onslaught of airplanes. I’m sure from her angle this must have looked like a reenactment from WW2. While retuning her guitar, out came an assistant to gather all the wreckage and begin sifting through the requests.

This was clearly not the most efficient way to capture an email address (given the manual labor involved), but her approach got me thinking. Adding a fun and interactive way to get people to sign up without beating them over the head with an offer could perhaps go a long way. The acquisition would probably provide more interested subscribers and could also serve as a great viral component as well.

We’re honored to have a special guest blogger contributing to our site today: Chris Parkin from Omniture! Read on to hear Chris’ thoughts about the power of email and web analytics integrations.

Email marketing continues to be a mainstay in online advertising, but a few trends are forcing marketers to be more disciplined in the way they reach their customers.

Consider the following:

• Your customers are bombarded with an incredible amount of information every day. They have access to innumerable information sources and an unprecedented amount of flexibility in the ways they connect to these resources. Some estimates suggest that the number of emails delivered annually is approaching 62 trillion messages. To put this into perspective, an estimated 1.2 billion people have Internet access in the world. Therefore, the average Internet user will receive 142 emails every day (including weekends). Also, other forms of digital messaging media are continuing to proliferate. One estimate indicates that 81.2 million text messages will be sent to U.S. mobile phone subscribers this year.
• Expectations have changed too. Your customers expect an experience that speaks to them individually – messaging to their basic demographic or market segment is not enough.

So what do these trends mean for the email marketer? Relevance is more critical today than ever.

Two of the best ways to make your messages more relevant is to incorporate timeliness or behavioral data into your campaigns. Fortunately for marketers, integrating web analytics data into email campaigns is an easy way to make messages both timely and relevant. Many of today’s winning email campaigns are using web analytics data to engage customers by reminding them of a product they recently abandoned on a website, or introducing them to additional benefits of a product they just purchased.

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