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.

The winter holidays are all about friends, family and spreading the cheer. For email marketers, this timely connotation translates into opportunity for deeper customer engagement, increased response and higher return on investment through the use of the viral and ever-popular “friends and family” campaign.

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.

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.

Email marketing is an ever evolving art.  It morphs and changes from one hot topic — or “must have” — to the next. Below are twelve current hot topics in email marketing listed in no particular order. Any serious or casual email marketer should know what these are and should use as many as them as he or she can in their email marketing endeavors.

7) ReMarketing (Abandoned Cart Campaigns)
One especially important and potentially lucrative triggered campaign is the abandoned cart (a.k.a. ReMarketing) campaign. This is an email sent to someone reminding them to purchase items/processes which have been abandoned — or left — in their online shopping cart. ReMarketing is a great way to nudge potential purchasers into converting.

8. Social Media Integration
Everyone seems to be tweeting, Facebooking and doing other awkward sounding social media actions. Be sure you include these important social media outlets in your emails. Allow subscribers to rave about how great you are on various social media sites or browse your corporate social media pages. Email marketing must adapt as the marketplace and subscriber preferences change.

9) Personalization and Dynamic Content
Use personalized or specialized imagery, product placement, or text when you can and when appropriate. Instead of saying “Dear Customer” in your message, it is much nicer to use your recipient’s first name — ‘Dear Balthazar” as an example. Also, utilize the data that you have on your subscribers. Some common dynamic content strategies are using different messaging based on the customer type, location, nearest store, browse or purchase behavior, recency, or email interaction.

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With social media trending towards character limitations, layout restrictions, and quicker feedback times, it seems that URL shortening services such as Bit.ly and TinyURL are becoming more and more ubiquitous every day.

So what exactly is URL shortening? In a nutshell, these services convert long web addresses into short, easy-to-use URLs that are convenient for sharing. If you’ve ever used Facebook’s status update tool or Twitter’s microblogging service, chances are you have come into contact with a link referring to a URL shortening service.

While I have yet to come across an email campaign that links to a shortened URL, I’d imagine that some email marketers will soon begin coordinating the links in their emails with the links distributed via Twitter and Facebook (to maintain consistency across channels). I also foresee email marketing messages occasionally incorporating tweets and status updates into the body of the email, which means that some URL-shortened links could be distributed via email.

So what should you know about URL shortening services before you incorporate them into your emails?

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