If you’ve been keeping a close eye on email offer and subject line trends over the last year, you may have noticed that ‘odd’ or unusual offers, such as 14 percent or 56 percent off, have started to appear more. The offers, such as ‘14% Off Limited Time Only!’, ‘Our weekly deal 71% off of today’s item‘, ’56% off Membership‘, and ’Famous February Artists + 22% off‘, are just a few of the examples we noticed at Experian CheetahMail.

These promotions may catch the eyes of subscribers, but return mixed results for mailers. Experian CheetahMail’s Strategic Services Team has proof – included in a recent benchmark analysis. Specific findings include:

• Subject lines with ‘odd’ or uncommon percent discounts (ex: 14%, 53%, 47%) were compared the email performance of traditional discounts (ex: 5%, 10%, 25%, etc)
• Subject lines with traditional discounts reported higher open, click and transaction rates for over 60% of the brands who also deployed odd discount offers.
• Not all of the campaigns with odd discount offers were unsuccessful.  The highest performing campaign in this study had open rates over 34 percent, click rates as high as 12 percent and transaction rates over 0.80 percent.

Tempted to try this tactic out? Go for it! But, test first. Testing is necessary before making these a standard part of your email marketing program. How can you test, you ask? Check back next week for my post entitled, ‘Dare to be different? Test first!’

Methodology: A selection of 23 clients that deployed odd discounts in Q1 2011 were analyzed, and the results were compared to promotional mailings with more traditional offers in the subject line from the same brands.

At Experian CheetahMail, we recently conducted an analysis on Flash Sale email campaigns, and found out some pretty compelling stuff! 

The study indicates that Flash Sale emails have more than 2x the increase in transaction rates compared to other offers. They are not ‘just another promotion,’ they perform better.

Email is a key traffic driver for advertising Flash Sales. It represents 18 percent of the referrals to Flash Sales websites — higher than social (13 percent) and search (11 percent). Some of the other discoveries include:

• A couple hours is all you really need: Three hour Flash Sales have the best transaction-to-click rates, which are 59 percent higher, as well as the highest transaction rates (.14%).
• Flash Sales tend to perform better in the evening: Transaction rates are 23% higher for evening Flash Sales compared to Lunchtime sales, and revenue per email is 30% higher in the evening.
• There are tried and true best practices: If you can’t test sending a Flash Sale later in the day, test sending a reminder to those that opened and clicked but did not convert.

 What I found most interesting was how well evening Flash Sales perform. Maybe people are working more and shopping online less during the day than some friends of mine…

 Click here to learn more.

I’d like to share a short story about gmail, email, and deliverability success…

Allposters.com (one of three Art.com brands) recently realized that a percentage (56%) of their Gmail subscribers were not receiving emails in their inbox. Working with their Email Service Provider (Experian CheetahMail ) Account team, they identified and implemented a series of initiatives that significantly improved their deliverability success, resulting in 100 percent of Allposters.com Gmail emails arriving safely in subscribers’ inboxes.

Here’s how:

• Removed Gmail hard bounces from file
• Drilled down into email behavior to identify the subscribers Gmail considered to be active
• Mailed only to 3 month active Gmail population
• Moved unsubscribe link for Gmail subscribers to the top of mailing
• Used a slower flow rate (10k/hr) for Gmail segments

In addition to the 100% deliverability rate, AllPosters.com experienced a 22% open rate increase, a 15% click to open rate increase and a.03% increase in transaction rate resulting in incremental revenue from customers!

View screenshots and check out the full story here.