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If you're like most e-commerce people, your business has just plunged headlong into the all-important fourth business quarter, culminating with the fast-and-furious holiday season.
If you aren't a typical e-retailer, you probably have e-commerce aspects built into your program, such as gift subscriptions, downloads, etc., that can be tailored to the holiday season.
And even if you have no holiday-related e-retail, you should know that your subscribers will be inundated with emails from everybody else. You must sharpen your focus and work the kinks out so that you can stand out amid the inbox clutter for the next three months.
All this means you should be at the top of your email-marketing game right now. with the wrinkles ironed out of your templates, your offers tested and ready to go, your mailing schedule plotted out to the day, and customer-service folks primed and ready to go.
Note: We said "should."
It's probably too late in the year to overhaul your program if you uncover problems or weak areas. However, we developed six strategies that can help you spot problems and perform quick fixes to get you through the season. Check them out before the holiday shopping traffic begins building more pressures.
Fine-Tune Email Marketing with Six Strategies
1. Review what worked and what didn't last year.
Pull out your reports from the previous year's fourth quarter. Look for these numbers, and look for trends up or down:
- Message-based metrics
- open rates
- click-throughs
- opt-ins
- unsubscribes
- delivery rates
- conversions, etc.
These metrics won't tell you if your campaigns were successful, but they will assess list activity and subscriber interest. Compare opens and clicks against the offers that generated them (see next item), and look at opt-ins, unsubscribes and delivery rates across all three months of the quarter.
Review all the offers you mailed out in light of the message metrics listed above. See which ones generated the most opens, clicks and conversions. Did any generate more than the usual number of unsubscribes or downloads?
- Outcome metrics
- Revenue per email
- Revenue per campaign
- Sales per email
- Order size
- Downloads (if appropriate)
- Registrations (if appropriate)
- Opt-ins (if appropriate)
On which of these did you make or exceed goal, and which fell short? Don't spend a lot of time analyzing last year's mistakes. Instead, identify weaknesses you can correctly quickly this season.
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2. Review the state of your current email-marketing program.
Yes, more number-crunching. This time, download the same categories of data from Strategy 1 into a spreadsheet, but use the last three to six months of data from this fiscal year. Scan for up or down trends.
If Sales wants to see a 20% improvement over the previous holiday quarter, can you deliver it with the kind of customer metrics you've been generating lately?
3. Assess list quality, age and history.
The best offers and the most optimal email design won't help you if your list is full of deadwood. Your newest customers are your most responsive, so redouble your efforts to build your list and build loyalty fast with readers. This will also help you retain opt-ins after the heady days of holiday shopping are over.
- Look at your list size over the last six months. Is it up, down or flat?
- Determine what percentage of your list is still active. Don't be shocked if a third or more is just addresses in the database. You'll find a procedure for doing this in this article from our online Knowledge Center: Trim the Certain Deadwood from Your Email List
- Re-engage as many of your lurkers as you can now. Send an email – an offer, invitation to update preferences, etc. – to subscribers who haven't clicked in three to six months.
- Create a welcome program to bring new opt-ins into the fold immediately. See the article Combat List Inactivity by Older Opt-Ins in the resource list below for ideas.
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4. Tune up your email program's physical characteristics.
This strategy covers all aspects of your email program except for content. It might be too late for a total overhaul, but you still have time for minor redesigns to your messages and your supporting Web pages (opt-in, preference page, landing pages).
The articles in the resource list following provide specific directions should you need more information:
- Does your email's sender and subject line show clearly in the inbox who sent it and what's in it? Your company, brand or newsletter name should appear in the sender line. State your message content in the first 50 to 60 characters.
- Do you put your most important content in the top left quarter of your message? This is the section that appears in an email client's preview pane, which a third to half of your readers use to scan content before opening.
- Does this important content show up whether images download or not? If you hide offers behind images, readers who block images by default won't see them. Always provide key content in text as well as HTML in an HTML message.
- Do HTML messages show up correctly in different email clients? Be sure that your HTML code is correct, because bad code reduces response rates and can trigger spam filters. EmailLabs has just released its free guide to HTML coding and use. Download it for free here.
- Do you provide opt-in blanks or links to your opt-in page on every page of your Web site and on landing pages for people who find you through paid search?
- Does your unsubscribe process function correctly? If it doesn't, you violate anti-spam laws in just about every country that has one.
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5. Reconsider email frequency.
Did you end up dropping more emails than you planned in the three to four weeks preceding Christmas in order to capture more last-minute sales? Did it work?
This is a potentially risky move, because it can trigger major subscriber backlash, leading to more ISP blocking and filtering. A 2005 holiday-shopper survey found nearly half received way more email than they had expected when they opted in, and more than two-thirds deleted the messages without reading them.
Go back to your unsubscribe or spam-complaint statistics and examine them around each time you dropped an email. You can increase your frequency if you do it carefully and systematically. The first two articles in the resource list below show you how.
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6. Test now before the traffic begins to build.
If you change or improve any aspect of your email program, test it on small samples of your customer database now to detect any improvement or backlash.
- Internally, test both text and HTML message templates in different email clients (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera) and on different platforms (PC, Macintosh, BlackBerry/cell phones).
- Experiment with your sending schedules by trying different days of the week or times of day to tweak subscriber response.
- Test two or three versions of your message, varying the offer placement each time to highlight optimal response.
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