Marketers are planning for the Back-to-School season earlier than in years’ past. A recent Experian Marketing Services’ poll found that 27 percent of businesses are starting Back-to-School marketing activities as early as May. Email marketers can get a jump on their campaign strategies and tactics by taking note of some key trends from 2011, including the smart use of subject lines. Experian CheetahMail data shows that references to style and offers are especially popular in Back-to-School subject lines and can help to generate high transaction rates. Several that delivered strong engagement in 2011 include:

• Sneak Peek — Go Back To School In Style!
• Reading, Writing, Arithmetic & Shoes!
• FREE Shipping — Today Only! Get Your Back-to-School Shopping Done Today!
• Up to 40 percent Off Just in Time for Back to School!

Comparing Back-to-School campaigns with and without offers in the subject line, we found that those with an offer outperformed those without one. For more insights, download Experian CheetahMail’s new white paper: Back-to-School countdown: Smart strategies for email marketing. Also please join our webinar on May 15 where our resident data experts Bill Schneider and Heather Dougherty will review data, emerging trends and opportunities that exist for marketers during the 2012 Back-to-School season.

We’d love to hear about Back-to-School marketing campaigns that have worked especially well for you in the comments section below!

Cyber Monday is here!  Are you tired of hearing about it yet?  Well here is a new fun fact that indicates just how big of a deal this last Monday of the month truly is.

Eighty-two percent more emails had Cyber Monday in the subject line this past Friday, November 18, to Saturday, November 26 as compared to the same dates last year, according to an Experian CheetahMail analysis.  

These subject lines didn’t just tout the day, they shouted out special deals and offers that were tough to refuse. Some of the subject lines that caught my eye included:

• Up to $50 off – it’s officially Cyber Monday!
• It’s Cyber Monday!  Don’t Miss Out! + Free Shipping Every Day
• 50% off Exclusive Cyber Monday Event Starts Now
• Bonus Event! 80% Off Cyber Fix Deal Starts Now

Keep the Cyber celebration going everyone – happy mailing (and shopping)!

Experian CheetahMail tracks the holiday mailing activity of 385 brands that also mailed in the 2010 Holiday Season. All metrics are based on results 3 days from send.

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!

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.

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.

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.