Get em while they last! The number of Flash Sale and Daily Deal emails have more than doubled in the first two weeks of this season compared to the same time period last year, according to Experian CheetahMail.

Why is this? Well – they work! And, people still can’t get enough. While recent industry buzz does point to the slight erosion of the Flash Sale tactic as time goes on, they’re still giving retailers a bang for their buck. So, email marketers, here is one of my early gifts for you – Flash Sale a tip list, straight from a recent analysis by CheetahMail’s in-house experts:

• 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. The lack of inbox competition for the customer’s attention later in the day offers email marketers an opportunity to optimize Flash Sale campaigns to improve ROI.
• Create a sense of urgency by clearly mentioning the discount, as well as the time limit of the discount, in the subject line.
• If your goal is purely engagement, or re-engagement, shorter Flash Sales can be more effective.
• The best Flash Sales have some combination of strong offers (50% to 70% off) and a selection of desirable products.

Regardless of your industry, Flash Sales can be a great tool — for retailers to push more holiday inventory, for hotels to drive holiday vacation bookings in specific regions, for restaurants to drive traffic on typically slow times of day, and so on.

While many of us find McLovin’s attempt to skirt the local liquor store attendant with a fake ID in Superbad humorous, a ruse of your brand via email is absolutely no laughing matter. In a phishing attack, a Sender attempts to trick a recipient into divulging confidential information under the pretense of a trustworthy brand entity. When such an attack happens, the impression generated by consumers can spell tragedy for the actual brand.

One of best ways to prevent phishing is to be proactive by employing domain name authentication. Authentication serves to protect your brand by providing a valid identity on a sending domain. Once authenticated, receivers then use it as a foundation for applying reputation and accreditation as well as a tool for more accurate filtering. CheetahMail is happy to announce that we have rolled out DKIM authentication behalf of all our clients. Top global webmail providers such as AOL, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail & Yahoo are now incorporating DKIM into their filtering algorithm as a way to establish domain-based reputations for senders.

DKIM is an update from the next previously implemented Domain Keys authentication which was introduced by Yahoo in 2004. To employ DKIM, the Sender must insert coding containing two keys into the header section of the message, so that each message is authenticated. The coding contains a private key, which is undisclosed and exclusive to the sending domain, and as well as a public key, which is broadly accessible via the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is a human-friendly system of associating domain names with IP addresses and is used by Receivers as validation of the Sender. To complete the process, the Receiver recovers the signer’s public key using the DNS and then verifies the DKIM signature via the private key.

While in the past, reputation was for the most part limited to IPs, DKIM now sets the stage for domain-based reputation. This is an important step in the fight against phishing as spammers are no longer able to use disposable and transient IPs and hide behind a made-up domain.

It’s important to note that IP-based reputation is not going away, it just means that domain-based reputation should be considered an enhancement to reputation establishment. Of course, continuing to utilize best practices such as mailing to a clean, engaged subscriber base will allow for both positive IP and domain reputation as well as good deliverability.  For more information on the advantages and challenges domain reputation brings about, please see Domain-based Reputation Explained.

Projections for this holiday season called for a 15%-20% increase in email overall volume, according to my last post. I’m happy to report that – so far, those projections are right on the money! Experian CheetahMail client data indicates that this first week, September 30 – October 6, hit that mark exactly with a 17.5% increase in all industry email volume.

Also worth noting…the words “Christmas” and “Black Friday” were used in subject lines in the first week of the 2011 Holiday Season, just as they were in 2010.

Stay tuned for more updates on emailresponsibly.com and the marketing forward blog as we watch the holiday marketing season surge!

So despite the findings included in my last blog post, (indicating that subject lines with uncommon discounts do not, on average, do as well as campaigns with traditional percentage discounts), you want to test them out for yourself? I don’t blame you! As marketers we all know that what doesn’t catch the eye of one brand’s audience may engage our specific subscribers in a very different way. Plus, what fun would our job be if we didn’t try to push the envelope, even just a little bit?

To get started in testing you’ll need to:

1. Establish the test objective

   Is it to test subject line performance, sales, or a combination of factors? Or, is it something else all together?

2. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as open rate, click rate, transaction rate.
   For example, if you are only testing subject lines, then you will want to use the open rate as your success metric. For a creative test, try using the click rate

3. Select the test method
   A/B testing or multivariate testing? It depends on if you’re changing one element vs many. Or, if you are only testing on one campaign and you want to evaluate the best subject line creative for a single campaign you can use a same day split method. This allows you to test your different versions against a small percent of your population and then send the winning subject line or creative to the rest of the population after a few hours or a day.

3. Test to an audience
   Ensure that test cells are statistically significant based on the metric chosen to evaluate the test.

4. Analyze your response data and determine the winner
   If the test won, then determine why. If not, then think about what you could have done differently and try again

5. Repeat

And remember; never make assumptions or long tern business decisions on short term tests.  Make testing part of your culture and your email program will reap its benefits.

You probably don’t need a crystal ball to know that this year, holiday email will grow. A lot.

Experian Marketing Services’ CheetahMail predicts holiday email volume to increase up to 20 percent over last year. That’s a ton of email! We have seen volume increases of over 20% for both Q1 2011 and Q2 2011 compared to the same time in 2010. Given the pressure to sell during a challenging economic holiday season this year, we should continue to see increases even though companies are starting the season at higher volume levels than they had in the past.

Here are some other email trends that we will see for this season:

•    Deep discounts
  • In Holiday 2010, offers shifted in comparison to 2009. Email marketers were sending deeper discounts and multi-offers (such as, 10% off and free shipping) much more than the year before. In 2011, we expect those two tactics to be even more prevalent.

• Use of coupons
  • Plenty of consumers still use printable coupons, and email marketers will make these offers very accessible and widespread. Remember that as much as we’re living in a digital age, not everyone has a smartphone, and not every retailer has the technology to scan QR codes or digital coupons quite yet.
• Links to social media
  • Many brands post their deals on twitter and facebook. Holiday email campaigns are expected to display a wealth of content that keeps social deal-seeking and sharing top-of-mind for consumers.
• Mobile links and offers
  • Links in email that display coupons or QR codes will surge. We’re becoming more mobile saavy by the minute, and the convenience it provides our customers also translates to more sales, and convenience of measurement, for us marketers.

Experian Marketing Services will be posting trends and tips throughout the 2011 holiday season on our blog so make sure to visit our site to find new ways to reach your audience and better understand consumer behavior.