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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.

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.

You might not realize it, but simple acts of neglect rank among the most important aspects of our daily lives as marketers and consumers.

Consider the process of checking your email inbox first thing in the morning – you scroll right by email after email, neglecting the very messages that you’ve specifically requested from your favorite businesses.

But is it really neglect? To the marketer focused solely on open rates and clickthroughs, sure it is. No clicks, no love, right? Think again. There’s a lot to be said for those emails – some opened, many not, a few previewed and then passed by – that sit stoically in our inboxes, relatively untouched. After all, these messages are accomplishing the one fundamental task that every marketer requires from their communications: reminding the customer that they’re there.

And therein lies an unsung power of email: the potential to supercharge the rest of your marketing channels through a simple reminder that stares customers in the face.

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