Games of chance, and the allure of winning big, have captivated humans for as far back as anyone can remember. From the infamous, and often crooked shell game to making it big on Wheel of Fortune, people love to take risks with the hope of a big reward.

I have noticed a similar big payoff reward in email marketing involving mystery savings. The idea is simple. Offer your subscribers the chance to win big savings, cash, or prizes. All they need to do is click a link, go to a store with a code, or enter a code at checkout. The catch is that only a small percentage of the recipients will be a big winner.

Below are a few email creative examples utilizing this idea. There are a variety of ways that a campaign like this can be run. One way is to break up your subscriber list and send each segment a different offer. You could send 50% of your list the worst offer, 30% the second worst, 20% the next best, and 10% the best offer. The segmentation on this type of campaign is almost limitless. Have fun and take a chance on this type of email campaign! Let us know your thoughts and experiences with mystery savings emails.

In just a few weeks I’ll be hopping on a plane to South Africa. This will be a long trip, and as such, has required me to make several travel-related online purchases that have yielded some particularly interesting email lifecycle campaigns.

The first example comes courtesy of Toktumi, a company offering VOIP calling via an iPhone application and service. Like many subscription-based services, Toktumi offers a free trial period of their product followed by an enrollment deadline. Toktumi’s lifecycle campaign, while very rudimentary from a creative perspective, is outstanding in several other key areas including time of delivery, relevant content and especially clear subject lines.

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Lurking somewhere in your email list and hiding among your web analytics data, your best customers are waiting to be discovered.

This Saturday I received a letter in the mail.  The envelope was nondescript and the return address was a P.O. Box I did not recognize. It looked and felt like the type of envelope that contains a new credit or ATM card. When I opened it up I was pleasantly surprised — inside was a letter from the Director of Customer Care at The Home Depot and a $50 gift card. The letter was thanking me for my online business during the past year!

I have to admit, I did spend a lot of money at The Home Depot over the last twelve months. I was in the midst of a variety of large scale home improvement projects that required the purchase of a washer, dryer, refrigerator, barbecue, sinks, cabinetry plus much more — all bought online. Before I received this letter I did not feel especially loyal to The Home Depot, despite having spent a lot of money with them. But if something better came along, I would not think twice about purchasing from a competitor.

I put some thought into it and determined that I bought from The Home Depot for four main reasons:

1. They have competitive prices.
2. They have a strong online presence.
3. They offered free shipping and other great offers in their emails.
4. They have online ratings and reviews. I want to read what others think about a product before I purchase it.

What is the moral of the story?

1. Know your best customers.
2. Thank your best customers often and appropriately. The Home Depot not only thanked me with this letter, but they gave me a gift card, a VIP email address and VIP phone number to their customer service if I ever need it.
3. Don’t assume that your best customers will always be your customers. Give them a reason to continue to do business with you.

Here is the letter I received from The Home Depot:

Recently, our strategic services team presented a webinar on re-engaging inactive users. In that discussion, they focused on the tremendous ROI benefits from focusing on users who aren’t regularly engaging with your email. During the webinar, the speakers spoke about testing mailing frequencies for your less engaged segments. They did not suggest suppressing inactive subscribers entirely. From a deliverability perspective this is an important detail for mailers looking to maintain long term list health to consider. There are three categories of ‘inactive’ subscribers that apply to deliverability and sender reputation:

• De-activated users: Every ISP and webmail provider handles de-activations differently, and most don’t publish their user activity requirements. Some providers such as Microsoft have publicly stated that they use old, recycled, addresses to identify potential spammers. Of course, defunct addresses will bounce. A smaller percentage of addresses that are not regularly mailed risk hitting these formerly active, but now converted to ‘spamtrap’ addresses, with subsequent mailings. The key to avoiding this situation is to never let an inactive email segment or other email list sit for longer than 6 months. Ideally, all addresses should be mailed at least once per quarter to ensure continued activity.
• “Mostly dead” users: One of my favorite movies is the Princess Bride, especially the scene with Billy Crystal as Miracle Max where he says “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.” Some ISPs and webmail providers will start the de-activation process, yet still enable successful email deliveries. Yahoo! publicly states that accounts are de-activated after 4 months of inactivity, but gives users a grace period to come back and re-activate their accounts. AOL and other ISPs have confirmed that they closely look at these types of accounts to identify potential spam activity since spammers will regularly create these accounts to mitigate their overall complaint rates directed to other users at the same ISP. These mailboxes will not generate a hard bounce error code — as would normally result from users who reach their storage limits (mailbox full), unknown users or unavailable users (resulting in bounce error MAILER DAEMON). It’s hard to distinguish these three types of subscribers, which is why it’s important to implement proactive marketing campaigns to target those subscribers on the brink of lapsing.

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Online and offline marketers should always try to keep their marketing databases and lists updated whenever possible. This data can include current email address, postal address, name, age, and gender to name a few. Having this data is one thing. Using it successfully and appropriately is another. Sure, first name personalization is great. Geo-targeting is awesome. Age appropriate marketing rocks. But what about gender?

Do men only want to receive content geared toward men? What if one of these men wanted to purchase something for a lady in his life? What about those whose gender is not known? What should these people receive?

There is a particular retailer that I used to love. I usually purchased items from them in-store. This past Christmas I purchased something for my wife from this retailer online via an email. From that point on I have only been receiving the female version of the catalog at my home. In this case this retailer assumed that since I bought one female item that I am an exclusively female shopper. This is a risky and potentially costly assumption — partly because of the way they have treated me since then, this retailer is no longer my favorite.

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