The WhatCounts e-Communicator

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	2008 Holiday Email Marketing Tips - Part 2 of 2

Dear Customers and Subscribers,

As promised, here is the latter half of our two-part series on best practices for holiday marketing (click here to see tips 1-3). Below, you will find ways to extend the holiday buying season and tips for cleaning up your email lists to maximize performance and enhance ROI.

The news on the economic front continues to frighten investors as well as consumers. With the tough season fast approaching, the focus needs to be on customer retention and appropriate investment.

2008 Holiday Marketing tips 4-7

1. Extend the Holiday Buying Season
Gift cards can be an immediate revenue source that keeps on giving. Did you know that 19% of gift card values are never redeemed by their recipients? You probably have a gift certificate program, but how visible is it in your marketing efforts? Maximize this simple upsell strategy and you will reap the benefits.

Promote gift cards on every page of your website
Cross-promote gift cards in transactional emails
Offer small denomination electronic gift cards in lieu of free shipping or as a retention technique or a reactivation campaign hook
Offer gift cards throughout the conversion funnel to allow your customers to add it to their orders
Offer e-gift cards through a well formatted e-card to friends and family for the holidays.

Employing a sound post-holiday strategy for your ecommerce business is very important. Many online retailers see a huge influx of revenue up until mid-December and then a large amount of returns thereafter.

Offer a promotional code emailed to holiday purchasers that can be redeemed on a one-day website sale the day after Christmas.
Offer a reengagement strategy for first-time holiday shoppers just before New Year’s while your brand is still fresh in their minds.
Think about incorporating a New Year’s sale and invite shoppers to treat themselves. You know that they have gift card money to spend, so encourage your customers to use those dollars right away.

2. Clean Up Your Act
This is the time to practice good list hygiene. Many marketers operate under the misconception that frequency and list size are directly related to revenue. However, indiscriminate emails will lead to list fatigue, high unsubscription rates and a poor reputation, which will result in poor deliverability and list attrition. Do yourself a favor and clean up those outdated addresses, and run queries for possible spam traps. In these tough economic times the goal has to be list segmentation through refined marketing. Segmenting your audience by their personally provided preferences allows you to send them highly targeted and relevant messages. These messages have a higher proven ROI and they will reduce email marketing program costs by paring down lists. Ultimately, over time, employing these tactics will improve your reputation and your deliverability.

3. Retention Marketing
With fewer first-time shoppers coming online this season, you are bound to see more familiar consumers shopping on your site, thus making retention your highest priority. It is important to reward loyalty and encourage evangelism.

Use all of the RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) data you have been collecting and make sure it is a pivotal part of your email segmentation strategy.
The holiday season is the perfect time to reward your most loyal customers. It’s also a great time to integrate a points-based program with your email messaging (i.e. earn points redeemable for discounts by forwarding messages to friends, reviewing products, purchasing gift cards, etc) to increase your mid-tier customer RFM scores.

4. Invest in Technology & Email Marketing
In tough economic times, marketers should focus on the most cost effective and highest returning media channels. Email marketing is often the most lucrative weapon in a marketer’s arsenal. Even more impressive is the ability to analyze and prove its worth through the powerful analytics that accompany this channel. Continuing to invest in email marketing is a must, given our current economy and the predicted 20% reduction that many marketing budgets will face in 2009.

Marketers also need to make sure that they are looking at all of the available options. Many organizations can save hundreds of thousands of dollars by "buying" an on-premise email marketing solution instead of "renting" an SaaS platform. Of course, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't remind you that WhatCounts offers both a hosted SaaS platform and an in-house appliance option for marketers that need the security, scalability and significant cost savings the on-premises option provides.

The WhatCounts professional services team is here for you if you are ready to make a change and need the strategic and professional guidance of seasoned e-communications veterans, please contact our WhatCounts' Professional Services Department at proservices@whatcounts.com.

Sincerely,

Ola Bateman | Marketing Manager


	DeliverabilityCounts - Don't Get Filtered Out

Dear Customers and Subscribers,

Marketing Sherpa’s 2008 Email Benchmark Guide featured a Spam Complainer's Survey conducted by Q Interactive. 56% of respondents said they prefer for their ISP to determine which messages get filtered into the spam folder. As a result, the legitimate emails for which your customers subscribed may not be getting into their inboxes if you are unknowingly including spam triggers in your emails. It is important to be cognizant of the most common spam triggers to keep your emails in the inbox where they belong.

Common Spam Triggers:

Over usage of key words like “free” and “sale”
Excessively small or large font (smaller than 8 point; larger than 14pt)
Excessive use of exclamation points or keywords in all capital letters
Misspelled words (filters can sometimes catch coupon codes that are in all caps as misspelled words)
Using one large image, or having a high proportion of images to text
Using an unfamiliar person’s name as the sender instead of the company or brand name
Using invisible font colors (like white on white)
Using JavaScript
Embedded images

Once you have checked your email for these triggers, you should use a spam filter to confirm that your email has a low spam score. With the WhatCounts e-Communications Suite, you can do a content analysis of your email using the latest rules from SpamAssassin. This will allow you to breathe a little easier, but it is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Also noted in the Email Benchmark Guide, 41% of people in their study report email as spam because it is not of interest to them. So, if you are sending irrelevant emails to your subscribers, you are running the risk of being reported as spam. If you start to get spam complaints, these complaints can ultimately cause ISP content filters to update and begin filtering all your messages. This is why I will be addressing the very important topic of relevance in next month’s Deliverability Counts.

Hopefully I didn’t use so many triggers that I have been filtered out of your inbox!

Sincerely,

Jen Moser | Marketing Coordinator

October 2008 - Issue 22

Holiday Marketing Tips

Extend the Holiday Buying Season

Clean Up your Act

Retention Marketing

Invest in Technology & Email Marketing

Deliverability Counts: Spam Filtering

Deliverability Tips