Category E-mail marketing
E-mail promotions: 5 Steps to lift revenue 69%
SUMMARY: Email promotions are the bread and butter of many ecommerce sites. But how can you increase the frequency of your promotions without causing a backlash from your subscribers?
Read how a wine marketer increased a weekly email promotion to a daily promotion — boosting its frequency 400% — without upsetting their list. Revenue generated through email has since increased 69%, and is now over 50% of total revenue.
CHALLENGE
Glenn Edelman, VP Marketing, Wine Enthusiast, had a good thing going. As ecommerce manager of Wine Enthusiast’s wine accessory website and its direct-to-consumer wine retailing website, WineExpress.com, he saw the latter as a small, profitable and growing business.
One of the site’s strongest revenue drivers was its Wine of the Week email campaign. Every Tuesday, subscribers would receive an offer for a bottle of wine that would ship at a discounted rate of 99 cents per bottle. The program was successful, but it had some limitations.
“Sometimes we didn’t pick [wines that sold well] and it sort of hurt demand for that week,” Edelman says. “Or, worse yet, if a wine was ultra-successful and sold out — some wines have sold out in a matter of hours — we had no special promotion to give people for the rest of the week.”
Edelman and his team wanted to expand the profitable Wine of the Week promotion and free it from the weekly schedule — without upsetting customers in the process.
Posted by Tom Polanski in E-mail marketing on June 1st, 2009
eBrand Media Research Brief: E-commerce grows using SEM to acquire and e-mail to retain
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
According to the first installment of of Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report from Forrester Research and Shop.org, e-commerce sales, including event and movie tickets, will grow about 11% to $156.1 billion this year from $141.3 billion in 2008. Online sales will account for 6% of total retail sales this year, up from 5% last year. Retailers report that their conversion rates continue to hover between 3% and 3.5%.
While Internet sales growth continues to outpace traditional retail sales, 54% of online retailers expect overall retail growth to slow during the next 12 months, and 57% acknowledge the economy is hurting their bottom line, according to the survey.
Although many retailers expect lower sales, however, four out of five surveyed online retailers think the web is better suited than other channels to withstand the recession and one-third say the downturn has helped them capture greater market share, the study found
Scott Silverman, Shop.org Executive Director, says “… Online retailers are trying to weather this economic storm by doing more with less, making smart spending decisions, and leveraging effective, affordable tactics like e-mail to grow their businesses.”
Posted by Tom Polanski in E-mail marketing, SEM, eBrand Media on May 19th, 2009
20% of marketers have “no clue” about their e-mail marketing performance
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
ERoi releases their latest survey, finding, in their words, that “… nearly 20% of email marketers have no clue how their email marketing campaigns perform.” The study, highlighting trends and use of analytics in email, concludes that these marketers “are taking an extremely careless approach to email marketing.”
Marketers tracking campaign results (% of Respondents, eROI, Inc., March 2009)
* Not tracking campaigns 18.06%
* Tracking campaigns 81.94
The savvy email marketer knows that a truly targeted email campaign goes beyond simply segmenting by demographic and focuses on behavioral segmentation, enabling delivery of the most relevant, targeted messages. But intelligent email marketing requires different tactics for follow up and re-engagement based on previous actions, concludes the study.
Open rate, followed by click rate and open to click ratio, are shown to be the top three metrics when marketers were asked to rank them by importance. However, concludes the writer, Open rate is not a reliable metric. Click rate is better, but unless tied to dollars, campaign ROI can be tough to prove. However, the ‘‘brand engagement value” of a click is extremely important and often discounted.
Another major opportunity is conversion tracking. A big surprise in this survey was the fact that about one-eighth of all email marketers are not tracking conversions. Of those, the majority don’t track conversions because of time or budget considerations, and about one quarter aren’t tracking conversions simply because they do not know how.
Posted by Tom Polanski in E-mail marketing on March 30th, 2009
eBrand Media uses seven proven strategies to heighten e-mail marketing efficiency
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
E-mail marketing is still one of the most powerful marketing, and relationship management, tools available. Even if you’re already inlcuding e-mail marketing as an important part of your media plan, I think, you’ll find the information contained in this blog to be of great interest.
SUMMARY: If your marketing team is forced to do more with less, consider tweaking your email strategy and expanding it into other areas. Below we’ve outlined 7 strategies that come directly from Case Studies and how-to articles.
Strategy #1: Use best practices and basic tests
In short — the basics work. Before expanding your emailing marketing to other areas, make sure that it is strong. Follow the industry’s best practices and test continually.
Applying the basics to an unrefined strategy can yield significant results. Erick Barney, VP Marketing, Motorcycle Superstore, related that sentiment after getting a reliable analytics system to measure and segment email.
Here are a few changes his team made:
o Scrubbing the list – removing names that bounced three consecutive emails increased deliverability by 30% after just five sends.
o Frequency – the team previously mailed once a month and tested more frequent sends, up to once a week. They eventually settled on a twice-a-month send, which boosted revenue over 100%.
o Day of week – the team found that the best days to send promotional emails were Mondays and Tuesdays to give them the most amount of time before hitting the Saturday brick wall.
o Subject lines – benefit-oriented subject lines worked best, and complimentary shipping outperformed the “lowest price guaranteed” phrasing.
o Segmenting the list – the team identified eight customer segments to whom they would send customized emails. Open rates doubled (38.6% from 18.5%), and clickthrough rates more than tripled (20.6% from 6.2%).
Posted by Tom Polanski in E-mail marketing, eBrand Media on March 6th, 2009
Study shows consumers respond positively to direct marketing e-mail
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
According to new survey research from Epsilon, the benefits of permission-based direct marketing e-mail campaigns have a significant impact on purchasing behavior and consumer loyalty.
* 57% of consumers feel they have a more positive impression of companies when they receive email from them.
* 33% of respondents said they usually visit sites directly, instead of clicking on an email link.
* 67% of respondents said they purchased products offline as a direct result of receiving an email from a retail company.
* 40% said that simply receiving email has a positive impact on their likelihood to make a future purchase from the company.
* 71% remember email communications when making purchases at the sending company’s web site.
* 66% said they usually visit sites directly instead of clicking on an e-mail link.
Consumers responding to this permission-based email branding survey said the receipt of emails makes them feel better about a company and increases chances that they’ll make a purchase, online or off-line.
* 84% of respondents said they like receiving email from companies with whom they register, because even if they don’t always read the message, it’s good to know the information or offer will be there when they’re ready.
* 50% of consumers agreed that receiving email from a company makes them more likely to purchase products from the sender in the future.
* 60% of women regularly save email in their inbox to refer to it later when making purchases.
* 49% of men regularly save email in their inbox to refer to it later when making purchases. This suggests that men are more likely to make impulse buys while women will wait for a deal or contemplate a purchase further.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Tom Polanski in E-mail marketing on March 2nd, 2009