• Flash Sales – Overall, Flash Sales generate a 35 percent lift in transaction rates over regular promotional mailings. This is noteworthy given the fact that all mailings with offers in subject lines have an average lift in transaction rates of 16 percent — less than half of the increase Flash Sale emails provide.
• Free shipping promotions – a tried and true holiday tactic that works. Made sure to advertise free shipping in the subject line, as well as prominently in the body of the email.
• Social sharing – Amplify any new product or promotion via social networks by enabling sharing anywhere and everywhere you can. In your emails – of course, but what about including sharing links in your online catalogs, or banner ad landing pages?

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.

• Now is the time to emphasize the “please add us to your address book” requests and instructions during the email registration process and in welcome emails. Not only will you get added to user whitelists which overrides ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder delivery, but also recipient response rates should be better, as well as brand perception, because images are displayed by default. A new trend for marketers is to consider sending a dedicated message solely to drive address book adoption in advance of the holidays. For example, “We are going to have some fantastic deals during the holidays. Add us to your address book to make sure you don’t miss them.” In light of the recent Facebook ‘Messages’ announcement, it is also now important to use such a dedicated email to request users become a ‘fan’ or ‘like’ your content.  [See example below]
• If you have a group of recipients who haven’t been mailed in a long time, before mailing them all at once, consider testing small segments to gauge complaint and bounce rates and make creative and segmentation adjustments with subsequent campaigns to ensure these metrics don’t become a risk to your overall messaging reputation.
• It is critical to maintain the same ‘from’ addresses and formulate subject lines that highlight the email’s ‘call-to-action’ and is not too ‘cheeky’ that it could be confusing or misleading to recipients where it may lead to user complaints.

In 2009, holiday email volume rose, increasing over  26% from the 2008 holiday season. We can predict this trend to continue for the 2010 holiday season meaning the ISPs will be working in overdrive to ensure all relevant and legitimate email is delivered into the Inbox while keeping out the large amount of true spam. Following these holiday best practices, and others such as maintaining ‘engaged’ users will help keep your clients’ IP reputation strong, your Inbox delivery rates high, your targeted customers happy and ultimately your revenue numbers up.

This fresh yet simple email explains when Zappos.com will begin their increased holiday email schedule. It also explains on which days the subscriber should expect to receive emails, and then reminds the subscriber to keep Zappos.com in mind for their gift purchasing needs.

Zappos.com, however, does not seem to allow their subscribers to opt-out or opt-down from the holiday specific campaigns. This is a feature I would look at implementing in the near future to mitigate unsubscribes and abuse compaints. Other than that, this is a great idea for many businesses as it keeps the customer informed and treats their relationship with respect.

Nice job!

The subject line of this email was, “Get Ready! A Sneak Peek Of The Zappos Holiday Season Is Inside!” Here is the creative:

Contrary to popular belief, the term “Cyber Monday” was not coined by an army of scotch drinking Japanese robots from the 1980′s, but rather by Shop.org, the prominent digital retail group who sought to create a sister holiday for Black Friday that focused solely on online commerce. Cyber Monday falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving and has become more and more recognized over recent years.

While we at Email Responsibly have touched on the topic of Cyber Monday in the past, today it’s time to look forward to see what is in store for Cyber Monday this year.

• In general, we expect to see an overall increase in the number of Cyber Monday and Black Friday mentions (by name) in email campaigns this year. This development comes on the heels of last year’s holiday season in which we witnessed firsthand the increasing usage of the actual term “Cyber Monday” in email campaigns. Furthermore, we expect to see these terms being used earlier, more prevalently and together in the same email – certainly more-so than in prior years.

• We also expect email volumes to increase on these days, but perhaps not as sharply as the increases seen in recent years. Considering that the volume of email sent on Black Friday increased 64% from 2007 to 2008, and 40% from 2007 to 2008, we don’t expect quite as large an increase from 2008 to 2009. However, the economy stands to play a large role in just how much email gets sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If consumer spending looks weak towards the end of November, we might see a spike in email volume as companies react by offering last-minute sales and deals.
• Looking at consumer behavior over recent years, we expect online shopping to heat up a few weeks prior to the start of the traditional holiday shopping season and then cool off slightly during the week of Christmas. Two years ago, online purchases peaked during the traditional shopping week ending Monday, November 26th (Cyber Monday) when fully a quarter of all adults bought something online. Online purchases in 2007 remained high for several weeks after Thanksgiving before falling to 17% during the week of Christmas. Now compare those statistics with those from last year (which had a late Thanksgiving) when online purchasing heated up even earlier – several weeks prior to Black Friday. In fact, between the weeks ending November 3rd and November 10th in 2008, the share of adults who made an online purchase more than doubled from 11% to 23%. For the most part, online purchase levels remained at or near this level for the duration of the 2008 shopping season until dropping back down to 16% during the week of Christmas.
• With Thanksgiving falling late in the calendar again this year, expect consumers to exhibit similar purchasing patterns as they did last year. In a typical week of the year, approximately 15% of all American adults make a purchase online. However, during the five weeks prior to last Christmas, an average of 23% of adults made an online purchase, which was 50% higher than normal. Look for more of the same when this holiday season rolls around.