Daniel recently sat down with DM News to discuss holiday email marketing and share tips and trends to help marketers succeed during this pivotal time. You can view Daniel’s Q&A here: http://www.dmnews.com/qa-daniel-schotland-vp-client-services-at-experian-cheetahmail/article/216860/

• 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.

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!

Well, you can say you heard it here first: Cyber Monday is barely a few hours into full swing and yet we’re already seeing email volumes increase by roughly the same percentage as last year in the run up to today’s mailing frenzy.

Last year, we saw an increase in ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ mentions the week before Turkey Day. This year, we saw even earlier and more frequent mentions of the two retail holidays in the run up to Thanksgiving.

• According to our data, in the week leading up to Thanksgiving this year (2010), email marketing volumes are up 23% overall.
• Holiday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions began before the week prior to Thanksgiving. Companies such as Sears led the charge by advertising black Fridays as early as October:
  

  Keyword	First Date Seen in Subject Line
  Black Friday	1-Oct-2010
  Cyber Monday	11-Nov-2010
  Christmas	5-Oct-2010
  Holiday	5-Oct-2010

Of course, we had a feeling this might be the case all along. Our predictions from the 2o1o Holiday Marketer said as much:

Overall email volume from Nov. 22 until Dec. 31 was up 15 percent year over year, spiking on Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It is interesting to note that in 2009, those high volume–prone days actually turned into longer spikes encompassing several days. The same pattern is likely to occur in 2010, with high volume periods of several days prior to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and each Echo Monday (the Mondays between Cyber Monday and Christmas).

We will keep you posted with more data about Cyber Monday as it becomes available. In the meantime, you can read other prophetic predictions for this holiday season in our recent report, The 2010 Holiday Marketer.

According to Experian Marketing Services’ new white paper, Spreading the word through friends-and-family emails, there are a few things that email marketers should keep in mind when deploying their friends and family programs this year, including:

• Friends-and-family campaigns are a good choice all year long.
  Friends-and-family emails should become part of your overall promotional playbook. They connect with subscribers and generate more revenue directly, while also providing referrals to potential new email subscribers and customers. These campaigns perform all year long — even during the fiercely competitive and discount-heavy holiday season.
• The words “friends and family” are important.
  Using the words “Friends and Family” will enhance the performance of email campaigns deployed by the same brand offering identical discount values. Ensure that the three words “Friends and Family” appear in the subject line and that the messaging is clearly promoted in the body of the email.
• Enable sharing.
  To increase the potential of reaching new and existing customers who might not have received the initial email campaign, maintain sharing features in their usual location (i.e., forward to a friend, share) while also adding larger call-outs that enable sharing within the body of the email, near the offer. Consumers are very accustomed to sharing friends-and-family offers, so it’s important to make it easy for them to do so.

Keep these tips in mind and spread the word this holiday season – the payoff can translate into a very happy New Year!

To read the new white paper Spreading the word through friends-and-family emails, click here.