holiday acquisition · holiday acquisition: improve your roi with these proven tactics. ......

by: Sally LoweryOnline Marketing Manager

Holiday Acquisition:Improve Your ROI With These Proven Tactics

Holiday Acquisition1-888-BRONTO1 • Bronto.com • © 2008 Bronto Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 1

The holidays are quickly approaching, are you prepared? Email marketing should be an essential component of your holiday marketing mix. With the appropriate email tactics, you can reinforce your customer relationship while converting your online prospects to purchasers. In a recent WebTrends survey, retailers cited email marketing as the most important demand-generation activity for holiday success.

According to ReturnPath’s 2007 Annual Holiday Email Consumer Survey, 49.1% of shoppers receiving holiday focused email marketing actually took advantage of the email offers they received. What does this mean to you? If you are a sender the customer trusts and whom they have found previous content to be valuable they should respond to your holiday marketing. There are a few things to keep in mind, however: • Trust & Frequency • Relevance • Tactics • Testing

Trust & FrequencyYour holiday email offers may make it to their destina-tion, but how do you guarantee they get opened? The key to having a customer receive, open, and act upon a message first begins with the recipient’s trust in the sender. Trust begins at the first contact with the custom-er or prospect opt-in. Are you committing to the experi-ences that you promised when they opted-in, including frequency and content? According to ReturnPath, 55.9% of customers polled said that the top factor contribut-ing to their decision to open and read an email was that they knew and trusted the sender. It’s extremely tempting to inundate your customers with messages at a higher frequency during the holiday season, but don’t. If you told your customer they would receive a once weekly savings email at opt-in, do not increase to three savings emails. You will break the trust that you‘ve built with them and they will choose to shop elsewhere. Instead, perhaps consider launching a special email series similar to Home Depot. Their holiday email series strayed from the traditional one email per week up to six emails per week. Customers who were attracted to the frequency and the offers subscribed to receive this additional email series. According to Email Experience Council’s, Ring-Cha-Ching, Hear Them Ring, “Racheting up your send volume too much during the holiday season can lead to higher list churn, so having a special

opt-in series can give you the opportunity to the customers that want them while protecting our core list and your sender reputation”.

© Return Path, 2006 Holiday Survey

RelevanceRelevance drives consumer sales. If the customer has no interest in the content you are sending them, they will not respond. Relevance, too, is critical to the trust factor. If you send messages that are ir-relevant, the customer is less likely to respond in the future. According to MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006, a segmented message performs an average of 6.28% better than a non-segmented message. So, how do you create the most relevant messages this holiday season? Hone your messaging by segmenting your audience. Creating segments based on demographics, purchase and online behavior, as well as preferences, can increase your response by dividends. By segmenting your audience, you can target your message and deliver products and offerings that your customers want to receive. You may also want to expand your preferences to include holiday shopping preferences. Those preferences can include whom they are shopping for, what they are shopping for, or discounts they may want to receive.

TacticsHoliday email marketing is a competitive market. Retailers will need to set themselves apart from the competition through special discounted offers, tips, advice, and the following additional tactics: • Cross-Sell • Up-Sell • Re-mailing

Cross-Sell & Up-SellThe holidays are an excellent time for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. With customers in buying-mode, it’s the best time to relay an offer - since the likelihood of them opening and reading is much greater.

Cross-sell and up-sell opportunities can be utilized through the online purchase process or through your holiday email marketing. You can up-sell a customer by offering them additional items relevant to their order or for a discounted price, at the time of purchase. You can even follow up in an email with last minute deals relevant to their most recent purchase. For example: Transactional emails provide an excellent opportunity to include a product promotion, last chance sale, or even a 2-for-1 upgrade.

Re-mailingThis holiday season also think re-mailing. It’s the most effective tactic for focusing on those who haven’t opened. It’s also an excellent testing tool. The value of a re-mail is exercising control over the factors that lead to your mail not being opened in the first place. Whether it was an ineffective subject line or an unrecognized “from” name, test alternatives against those that didn’t open. After your cam-paign is no longer receiving responses, segment those that didn’t open, and resend the same message with an alternative subject line or “from” line. You may also want to consider send time in your re-mail as well. Perhaps your send time wasn’t ideal for your West Coast customers. Hit them with your mes-sage at the right time with the right message. Re-mails provide a valuable opportunity to experiment with different times during the day and week.

Holiday Acquisition1-888-BRONTO1 • Bronto.com • © 2008 Bronto Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

TestingReturnPath’s 2007 Annual Holiday Email Consumer Survey, mentions that 41.4% of messages are open based on the subject line. During the holidays test your subject line. Experiment with free shipping, shipping delivery options, offers, and gift cards. All have been effective tools for retailers during previ-ous holiday seasons.

Possible Subject Lines: 20% off + FREE UPGRADE to 2-Day Shipping Last Chance for Christmas delivery at no extra charge Last Call for Free Shipping! Just in Time for the Holidays – The Online Gift Certificate Out of Time? Email a Gift Card! Need a present? Problem solved: e-mail gift cards Shop New Arrivals Shop holiday deals under $50 *taken from EEC’s Ring-Cha-Ching, Hear Them Ring

You can also effectively test your offer through A/B and multi-variate testing. It’s important to begin testing early, so that you know what performs well to include in messaging for last minute shoppers. Free shipping may outweigh discounted pricing, however, discounted pricing may out-perform mes-sages pushing in-store purchases. Test and find what effectively works for your customers and pro-spective customers to yield the best results.

WebTrends 2006 Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report


The bottom line this holiday season is respect your customer, continue to build loyalty, and make the message as relevant as possible to guarantee the highest ROI. Let your 2007 holiday email-marketing plan strengthen your customer relationships.

About Bronto SoftwareBronto Software is an industry-leading email marketing service provider. Since its’ founding in 2002, Bronto has simplified email marketing for businesses and organizations by offering a powerful, easy-to-use, email marketing solution together with industry-leading client services. The exceptional deliv-erability, detailed analytics and robust feature set of the Bronto application enables marketers in retail and other industries to easily and effectively implement email marketing that results in a positive ROI and business growth.

WebTrends 2006 Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report


holiday acquisition · holiday acquisition: improve your roi with these proven tactics. ......

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