Through week 7 of this holiday season, the percentage of campaigns offering 10% and 20% have decreased, while those offering 30% and 50% off are on the rise in comparison to 2010, according to the latest analysis by Experian CheetahMail.

Interestingly, ‘Buy One Get One’ (BOGO) offers are generating lower transaction rates and revenue per email  than 25% or 50% off campaigns. Are consumers more drawn to 25% and 50% off offers –which essentially are the same thing as BOGO half-off (25%) and BOGO free (50%)?  It sure seems that way!

If you are an email marketing considering a BOGO offer this holiday season, I’d recommend testing both types of offers in your subject lines to see what works best for you.

Happy mailing!

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!

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps I’ve now seen all of the Toy Story movies too many times with my kids, because the line from the theme song really sticks out with Facebook Messages; “Some other folks might be a little bit smarter than I am, bigger and stronger too, maybe. But none of them will ever love you the way I do, it’s me and you.”

Even without seeing the new Messages user interface and only seeing ‘Zuck’ and ‘Boz’ demonstrate a portion of it yesterday, it seems apparent that the Facebook email application is not a ‘Gmail killer’ or intended to be competitive with any full-fledged email client webmail or software program. But what it does have that no one else has captured is the notion of a truly personalized messaging platform.

However, my wake-up moment on the webcast yesterday was when they disclosed that any user can change their privacy settings to restrict emails just to their friends, friends of friends, or everyone. More importantly, should the user tighten their settings to exclude everyone, Facebook will bounce all emails from that sender to that user. In other words, if a marketer does not have a ‘fan’ or ‘friend of friend’ relationship with that user, then they should assume the address will bounce.

It is important to note that there apparently will not be a ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder for these unrelated messages to be filtered into, just an ‘other’ folder that isn’t designed to be a ‘reputation’ or anti-spam filter since all emails from unrelated senders will just bounce away. There is no ISP ‘Batphone’ when trying to resolve deliverability to ‘friends’, so even the most experienced and skillful deliverability team in the world won’t be of much assistance with most Facebook deliverability problems.

The clear conclusion from this is that marketers should not attempt to collect an @facebook.com email address without making a strong effort to first ensure that the user is a ‘fan’ or logs in through Facebook Connect.   This should require Facebook-specific language on the email registration or transaction page, or most certainly on the post-registration or transaction page. Because if you don’t do something to befriend these users, then your ‘Messages’ may not get there at all.

Congratulations, a new customer has signed up to receive your emails!  Now what? It’s obvious that they want to hear from you — this is the opportune time to make an impression that will leave them wanting more.

Welcome emails allow you to engage with your prospective customers when their propensities to open, click and transact in emails are at peak levels. So why do so many businesses still rely on very generic confirmation emails that miss out on the opportunity at hand and are neither engaging nor of any value to the recipient?

Maybe they don’t realize how easy it can be to optimize welcome messages in order to make open rates, clickthroughs and ROI soar.

Thankfully, there are a number of proven tactics for making your welcome emails all they can be and more. Among the best practices discussed in Experian CheetahMail’s new white paper, The Welcome Email Report: Benchmark Data and Analysis for Engaging New Subscribers Through Email Marketing, here are a few best practices that are definitely worth considering:

• Give a formal introduction: Include your brand name in the “from” address, and be sure to “welcome” your subscribers in your subject lines. Also include whitelisting instructions so that the subscribers can add the “from” address to their list of accepted senders.
• Gain insight on their interests: Use category navigation links or images and other clever calls to action from which you can infer subscriber interests. Leverage the click-through data for segmentation and targeting from the start of the subscriber relationship with your email program to increase engagement and relevancy
• Recognize past purchasers: Include dynamic messaging to recognize existing customers who are new to your email program. Using any data you have to drive any communication, even the initial welcome, can make an immense positive impact on the customer relationship.

Don’t forget to check out The Welcome Email Report: Benchmark Data and Analysis for Engaging New Subscribers Through Email Marketing to learn more.