The Experian CheetahMail Q1 2011 Client Benchmark Study clearly reports that while email volume remains higher than in Q1 2011, total and unique open and click rates increased year-over-year at 3% or more and 6.5% or more respectively.

Revenue per email remained steady at $0.13 as it has been since Q3 2010. Specific verticals in particular saw strong trends across all engagement and transaction metrics such as the Home Vertical. Grocery & Pharmacy, Shoe, and Telecom & Technology Verticals also saw nice increases in transaction rates. The positive trends might reflect a slightly healthier economy or that email marketers are getting smarter. Marketers are investing more into segmenting their email file by email response as much by traditional RFM rules as well as by incorporating more lifecycle driven triggers and optimizing their subject line and creative on an ongoing basis to maintain a healthy file and strong metrics.

Congrats, email!

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.

Today, Experian CheetahMail released

As most of us would expect, abandoned cart messages pull higher open, click and transaction rates than standard promotional messages. However, marketers might be surprised to learn that cart abandoners respond differently to triggered emails that leverage web analytics data. A few specific notes on browsers versus abandoners include:

• Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.
• Meanwhile, customers that only browsed products but did not add any items to their cart (i.e. ‘browsers’) are much more likely to respond to an incentivized email offer.

This report confirms that email marketers don’t need a special remarketing offer to convert abandoners into buyers. This is a positive development for the email industry in that we don’t effectively encourage our customers to abandon their carts with the hope of receiving a discount email at the end of the process.

Another frequent question is whether or not the email call-to-action should direct traffic directly to the shopping cart, or to land on the website home page. Data from this report suggests that marketers should keep the following rules in mind:

• The quicker a customer can access their own cart and view the actual products they were interested in, the higher the returns.
• That being said, even the most basic abandon and browse emails (even those that simply link to a website home page) pull in over 31% higher transaction rates compared to bulk promotions — a number that senior management will find difficult to ignore.

Across all industries, businesses are finding opportunities to follow-up with customers based on various website browsing activities. This white paper gives marketers the vital tips they need to avoid leaving unspent money on the table. Find your strategy to “remarket” to abandoners and browsers — download the white paper now!

So, I was fairly intrigued to read about new restaurants in Boston using Twitter to create buzz around their grand openings. Of course, an event like an opening is inherently interesting to local consumers because of its newsworthy nature. But after the first customers are served, how does the restaurant continue to use Twitter effectively? What would I want them to tell me?

I guess I want to know what’s in it for me. Daily menu specials or entertainment listings might be beneficial to Twitter users. Even better, if we’re talking about a very busy restaurant where I can almost never get a reservation, Twitter would be a great place to share table availability due to last-minute cancellations. (Maybe then I would finally be able to eat one of the tasty daily specials I always read about!)

In fact, wouldn’t it be great if any appointment-based business – both large and small – posted cancellations? The spa that is booked four months out…your doctor…your dentist… the possibilities are endless! Twitter could be the answer to profiting from excess inventory, with the added benefit of making loyal followers happy at the same time. Taking this idea one step further, maybe one day airlines will use Twitter to find volunteers to take a later flight when overbooking occurs, meaning that you could volunteer before even leaving for the airport and therefore minimize your wait time (while expediting the initial flight’s departure). One company who is already putting this concept into action is Dell, who uses their @DellOutlet Twitter account to sell refurbished PC’s (a kind of remnant inventory) as they become available. According to recent news stories, Dell has made over $3 million in sales thanks to their tweets.

Who knows, maybe someday the DMV will let us know when they are having a particularly busy day so we can consider going another time – I know we could all see the benefit in that! Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Photo credit: Boston.com

The eMarketer study cites high shipping costs as the top reason why consumers abandon their shopping carts, as well as the desire to comparison shop, a lack of money, and wanting to search for a coupon.

These findings reinforce my rationale for frequently encouraging clients to create abandon cart campaigns. As I see it, ReMarketing should be a key part of almost any businesses’ email lifecycle program, helping maximize potential revenue during checkout.

When it comes to ReMarketing, there are a few critical rules to remember:

• You can only email people who have registered on your site or who have opted into your email program after the abandonment occurs.
• Frequency caps are recommended to limit the number of times a person receives an abandon message (particularly if there are coupons involved).

I also recommend using other site features beyond the scope of email to reduce the number of carts abandoned by unregistered users. These strategies include:

• Next to the total price and check out buttons, I recommend building a “shopping list” or “wish list” feature to store items for future purchase. Personally, I always use the shopping cart tool to bookmark what I want so that later on I can easily find the products when I am ready to buy. By giving users this functionality, shoppers can use wish lists to easily port the items to and from their shopping carts. This functionality also gives businesses another avenue to quickly acquire email addresses during the wish list setup.
• You may want to consider “pop under” windows triggered by abandoned carts. When someone abandons the site – particularly from check out – you can launch a pop under with a simple email sign up form promoting the value of your email program.

If you’d like to learn more about ReMarketing, you can have a look at our proprietary ReMarketing solution, as well as our partner integrations with the leading web analytics companies.