The holiday season is sneaking up on us, and most online sellers (83% according to Smith-Harmon) are gearing up to send more promotional email – and LOTS more of it.
The Retail Email Index, which monitors the promotional email volume of the top 100 online retailers, reports that retailers on average sent a whopping 14.3 emails to each subscriber per month during November and December 2009, with 3.9 messages in the week ending December 18th (typical shipping cutoff date).
While increasing frequency may result in higher sales, there are dangers of sending so many messages. Smith-Harmon’s latest research report, the 2010 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season, asks you to consider the drawbacks:
1. The cost of replacing subscribers lost to higher churn
2. The sales lost because increased spam complaints caused delivery problems
3. The opportunity cost of lost sales due to higher ignore rates as subscribers tune you out because you are over-sending
On top of the spam issue, ISPs are factoring engagement (opens) as part of their reputation score calculation. Sending a lot of messages that subscribers ignore signals to ISPs your messages are not relevant, which can hurt your future delivery to subscribers across that ISP.
Does that mean you shouldn’t ramp up frequency at all? Heather Blank, vice president of strategic services at Responsys, recommends that marketers be strategic about increasing volume, identifying customer segments that are more tolerant of high volume.
You can segment out these customers by looking at previous engagement metrics like open rates, click throughs and purchase rates. You can also ask customers to update a “preference center” where they can choose frequency, types of offers and so on (but don’t rely on this tactic, as only a few will actively manage preferences).
For more holiday email tips, Smith-Harmon is offering their latest report free of charge.
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Hm…I guess I can just send out a very good deal for my list instead of sending them all those offers
This is a timely piece. We started in June and July with most of our clients looking at not only last 2 holiday seasons, cadence, timing, offers and results, but took a secondary look at the Year To Date in 2010. During the year we had many of them change up the timing, frequency and offer testing in in order to get some useful data for this key annual period where most retail companies (and Ecommerce businesses) drive the highest sales and engagement volumes.
I think there are some real opportunities for increasing frequency if:
1. It is relevant to each customer/subscriber
2. You are providing value in the content/context instead of just another Free Shipping deal or 30% off.
3. You have looked at the past numbers to set your plans.
4. You are watching your real and perceived competition online and offline to gauge where the timing and opps are for subscribers/customers that might be engaged with a few programs at the same time.
5. You are ALWAYS looking at the data.
You might like this case study on a program we changed last year for a global apparel retailer and what worked.
http://www2.eroi.com/l/264/2010-02-10/GF2WP
In regards to the new changes at ISPs they are going to play a BIG part in this holiday season. Wishing everyone luck here. One side thought I have had on this is with Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail new features and “smart” filtering do they take into consideration how many people use these services in a POP3, IMAP or simple FWD set up into Mail on iphones, outlook and other email programs? Not many people have talked about this yet and I think we are going to see some surprises here.
Based on all the noise, challenges and comp, we should all be focused on our initial Thank you, Welcome and 1st touch emails AND equally focused (if not more so) on the opportunities abandoned cart emails, transactional, shipping and follow up product rating emails present outside of just the pure play marketing emails.
This is a time to look at and AUDIT your whole program.
We will also be sharing some take aways since last holiday season at DMA 2010 in SF in October. Hope to see you guys there.