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As “Peak Week” approaches and retailers gear up for their most critical holiday shopping period – which Experian Marketing Services has identified as the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday – smart marketers are refining their email strategies in real time. Daniel Schotland, VP of Client Services at Experian CheetahMail, and his team have been analyzing year-over-year trends as well as daily data and have important advice that’s sure to create good cheer with retail marketers. For example, flash sales, friends and family focused emails and other viral marketing programs, are garnering twice the response rates of other types of messages this season.

Daniel recently sat down with DM News to discuss holiday email marketing and share tips and trends to help marketers succeed during this pivotal time. You can view Daniel’s Q&A here: http://www.dmnews.com/qa-daniel-schotland-vp-client-services-at-experian-cheetahmail/article/216860/

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.

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.

Did you know that back-to-school emails sent in July have the highest unique open rates?

A big part of a successful back-to-school email marketing program is knowing the best time to start promotions; what types of mailings will drive the most customer response; and how to capitalize on peak times of buying interest on a more granular, or product, level.

Back-to-School mailings with offers in the subject line had 69 percent higher transaction rates than those without offers.

According to a new analysis, major email marketing trends and opportunities for driving back-to-school retail sales, include:

• September shows a higher proportion of back-to-school supply promotions in comparison to apparel.
• Search queries including “back to school” have increased each year for the past three years.
• Back-to-School mailings with offers in the subject line had 69 percent higher transaction rates than those without offers. (This is noteworthy given the fact that during last holiday season, for example, campaigns with offers in the subject line provided an average 20 percent lift in transactions).
• And more…

Click here to view all findings in the new white paper, 
Back to School Countdown: The A,B,C’s of preparing your email programs for the big day

Pretty pictures can go a long way: How Boston Proper visually engages its email subscribers

Boston Proper, a leading cataloger and specialty retailer of stylish, contemporary women’s sportswear, aims to grow online sales and extend customer loyalty while driving traffic to its e-commerce site, www.bostonproper.com. Since Boston Proper has a highly loyal customer base, avoiding the overuse of promotional discounts and, instead, relying on strong visual merchandising and imagery to drive conversions was key.

By working with Experian CheetahMail (read the full case study here), Boston Proper was able to send brand conscious and highly relevant emails to build a remarkably loyal and profitable customer base. Some of the key creative tips used by the brand, that other companies may want to consider implementing into their own program include: 

Visual cohesion with your website: Boston Proper designed visually stimulating HTML email templates based on strategic or best practice recommendations from Experian Cheetahmail. The designs mirrored the imagery on www.bostonproper.com as well as in the Boston Proper catalog, creating a visual cohesiveness amongst channels and giving customers a familiar and engaging design to interact with. 

Let reporting drive design: Once creative was complete, Boston Proper began mailing to their subscriber list two times a week, simultaneously collecting data on each customer’s response rate and activity. After a few weeks of reporting they were able to determine which mailing frequencies, offers and message content garnered the greatest response from each customer type. 

Target imagery by segment: To leverage these findings, Boston Proper used the segmentation tools in the CheetahMail application to send the most appropriate messages, at the most optimal frequencies, to each group accordingly. For example, the entire file receives two general catalog announcements per month, and a second email per week promoting a top selling product classification. Customers who interacted with the emails in the last 90 days receive a third email that is more category, trend or product specific. 

Boston Proper’s email messages have outperformed those of their industry peers in nearly all areas, with significantly higher clickthru rates and revenue per email. Furthermore, unsubscribe rates have fallen below .15%, proving that customers are highly receptive to the messages Boston Proper sends.