Well, you can say you heard it here first: Cyber Monday is barely a few hours into full swing and yet we’re already seeing email volumes increase by roughly the same percentage as last year in the run up to today’s mailing frenzy.

Last year, we saw an increase in ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ mentions the week before Turkey Day. This year, we saw even earlier and more frequent mentions of the two retail holidays in the run up to Thanksgiving.

• According to our data, in the week leading up to Thanksgiving this year (2010), email marketing volumes are up 23% overall.
• Holiday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions began before the week prior to Thanksgiving. Companies such as Sears led the charge by advertising black Fridays as early as October:
  

  Keyword	First Date Seen in Subject Line
  Black Friday	1-Oct-2010
  Cyber Monday	11-Nov-2010
  Christmas	5-Oct-2010
  Holiday	5-Oct-2010

Of course, we had a feeling this might be the case all along. Our predictions from the 2o1o Holiday Marketer said as much:

Overall email volume from Nov. 22 until Dec. 31 was up 15 percent year over year, spiking on Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It is interesting to note that in 2009, those high volume–prone days actually turned into longer spikes encompassing several days. The same pattern is likely to occur in 2010, with high volume periods of several days prior to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and each Echo Monday (the Mondays between Cyber Monday and Christmas).

We will keep you posted with more data about Cyber Monday as it becomes available. In the meantime, you can read other prophetic predictions for this holiday season in our recent report, The 2010 Holiday Marketer.

The winter holidays are all about friends, family and spreading the cheer. For email marketers, this timely connotation translates into opportunity for deeper customer engagement, increased response and higher return on investment through the use of the viral and ever-popular “friends and family” campaign.

According to Experian Marketing Services’ new white paper, Spreading the word through friends-and-family emails, there are a few things that email marketers should keep in mind when deploying their friends and family programs this year, including:

• Friends-and-family campaigns are a good choice all year long.
  Friends-and-family emails should become part of your overall promotional playbook. They connect with subscribers and generate more revenue directly, while also providing referrals to potential new email subscribers and customers. These campaigns perform all year long — even during the fiercely competitive and discount-heavy holiday season.
• The words “friends and family” are important.
  Using the words “Friends and Family” will enhance the performance of email campaigns deployed by the same brand offering identical discount values. Ensure that the three words “Friends and Family” appear in the subject line and that the messaging is clearly promoted in the body of the email.
• Enable sharing.
  To increase the potential of reaching new and existing customers who might not have received the initial email campaign, maintain sharing features in their usual location (i.e., forward to a friend, share) while also adding larger call-outs that enable sharing within the body of the email, near the offer. Consumers are very accustomed to sharing friends-and-family offers, so it’s important to make it easy for them to do so.

Keep these tips in mind and spread the word this holiday season – the payoff can translate into a very happy New Year!

To read the new white paper Spreading the word through friends-and-family emails, click here.

Since the holiday season is the most important time of year for retail emailers, here are some best practices for maintaining a good sending reputation and staying in the Inbox during the upcoming holiday season – a time when the Inbox is inundated with emails and offers.

• Now is the time to emphasize the “please add us to your address book” requests and instructions during the email registration process and in welcome emails. Not only will you get added to user whitelists which overrides ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder delivery, but also recipient response rates should be better, as well as brand perception, because images are displayed by default. A new trend for marketers is to consider sending a dedicated message solely to drive address book adoption in advance of the holidays. For example, “We are going to have some fantastic deals during the holidays. Add us to your address book to make sure you don’t miss them.” In light of the recent Facebook ‘Messages’ announcement, it is also now important to use such a dedicated email to request users become a ‘fan’ or ‘like’ your content.  [See example below]
• If you have a group of recipients who haven’t been mailed in a long time, before mailing them all at once, consider testing small segments to gauge complaint and bounce rates and make creative and segmentation adjustments with subsequent campaigns to ensure these metrics don’t become a risk to your overall messaging reputation.
• It is critical to maintain the same ‘from’ addresses and formulate subject lines that highlight the email’s ‘call-to-action’ and is not too ‘cheeky’ that it could be confusing or misleading to recipients where it may lead to user complaints.

In 2009, holiday email volume rose, increasing over  26% from the 2008 holiday season. We can predict this trend to continue for the 2010 holiday season meaning the ISPs will be working in overdrive to ensure all relevant and legitimate email is delivered into the Inbox while keeping out the large amount of true spam. Following these holiday best practices, and others such as maintaining ‘engaged’ users will help keep your clients’ IP reputation strong, your Inbox delivery rates high, your targeted customers happy and ultimately your revenue numbers up.

Perhaps I’ve now seen all of the Toy Story movies too many times with my kids, because the line from the theme song really sticks out with Facebook Messages; “Some other folks might be a little bit smarter than I am, bigger and stronger too, maybe. But none of them will ever love you the way I do, it’s me and you.”

Even without seeing the new Messages user interface and only seeing ‘Zuck’ and ‘Boz’ demonstrate a portion of it yesterday, it seems apparent that the Facebook email application is not a ‘Gmail killer’ or intended to be competitive with any full-fledged email client webmail or software program. But what it does have that no one else has captured is the notion of a truly personalized messaging platform.

However, my wake-up moment on the webcast yesterday was when they disclosed that any user can change their privacy settings to restrict emails just to their friends, friends of friends, or everyone. More importantly, should the user tighten their settings to exclude everyone, Facebook will bounce all emails from that sender to that user. In other words, if a marketer does not have a ‘fan’ or ‘friend of friend’ relationship with that user, then they should assume the address will bounce.

It is important to note that there apparently will not be a ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder for these unrelated messages to be filtered into, just an ‘other’ folder that isn’t designed to be a ‘reputation’ or anti-spam filter since all emails from unrelated senders will just bounce away. There is no ISP ‘Batphone’ when trying to resolve deliverability to ‘friends’, so even the most experienced and skillful deliverability team in the world won’t be of much assistance with most Facebook deliverability problems.

The clear conclusion from this is that marketers should not attempt to collect an @facebook.com email address without making a strong effort to first ensure that the user is a ‘fan’ or logs in through Facebook Connect.   This should require Facebook-specific language on the email registration or transaction page, or most certainly on the post-registration or transaction page. Because if you don’t do something to befriend these users, then your ‘Messages’ may not get there at all.

Experian CheetahMail has just released its latest client case study, HealthyPet strengthens customer loyalty through personalized email content. Below, resident email expert Erin Geoghegan helps explain why lifecycle messaging is so successful for HealthyPet.

Why is lifecycle email marketing such a hot topic these days? For one, it has proven out time and time again that lifecycle email communications can significantly boost subscriber engagement and retention. After all, messaging based on factors that change over time increases relevancy and speaks to customers at much more personal levels.

One example of lifecycle messaging done right is a recently launched campaign from Healthy Pet Magazine. HealthyPet, a veterinary communications and analytics company offering pet owner reminders and education via a comprehensive suite of print and digital communications, leverages dynamic content and offers relevant cross-sell promotions to significantly increase email opens and click rates while deepening customer engagement. Read More »