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!

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!

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.

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.

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.