Bronto Blog

Time to Get Creative for the 2012 Holiday Season

Fawn Young — Thu, 24 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Holiday planning in June? Believe it or not it’s not too early to begin planning your holiday calendar, especially when it comes to testing.

Since testing is not a one and done type subject, but rather something that you need to test over and over again to be sure your test results weren’t a fluke, it’s important to go ahead and start any creative testing now. By determining the winning elements of your creative now you’ll be ready to implement those into your emails when the holiday season rolls around this year. You’ll be one up on your competitors if you already know what works and have your calendar planned out.

Top Four Elements to Test

Navigation bar - Incorporate a holiday centric secondary navigation bar in your emails. You can include categories such as gift ideas, gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts under $25, gifts under $50, most gifted, most wished for, etc- whatever makes the most sense for your business and product lines. Incorporating a holiday centric navigation bar in your emails will not only provide additional shopping opportunities, but can also help call out areas of your site that may get overlooked or help serve as a reminder that the certain holiday is coming up and it’s time to buy supplies for that 4th of July party or a gift for your Grandmother for Grandparents day. You may not want to run this all the time, but there are many holidays between now and Thanksgiving that it may make sense to test this such as: Father’s Day (June 17), 4th of July (July 4), Labor Day (Sept 3), Grandparents Day (Sept 9), Boss’s Day (Oct 16), Halloween (Oct 31), Veterans Day (Nov 11), Home Depot and Blue Fly both incorporated a holiday centric secondary nav bar during the 2011 holiday season:
Call to action button: Test your call to action buttons as well. You may be surprised to find that "Learn More" drives more conversions than "Shop Now" or that a red button works better than a green button. You’ll also want to test the placement of your call to action button. If your button is always located on the right side of your message, move it to the left side for a few sends and see how it performs. The call to action wording, color and placement can all have an impact on your conversions. Testing will give you the data you need to make the winning decisions.
Imagery: Test out the imagery that you use in your emails. For example, do holiday specific images work better (you’d think they would) or do more branded images work better for your audience? You may think you already know the answer, but the beauty of testing is that you can let the data tell you. Often clients of mine are surprised by the results of their tests because what they thought was going to win actually doesn’t.
Offers: Offers are a biggie, especially during the holidays. You really need to find what makes you stand out in the inbox. If you’ve already got a “go-to” offer, start testing that now against other offers. For example, if you always do 10% off $50 test that against $5 off $50. Even though it’s essentially the same offer you may find that your subscribers respond better to a $ off versus a % off. Go ahead and nail down these types of learnings before the true holiday season kicks in so that you start with your best offers from the beginning. In a nutshell, the holidays are no time to begin learning what works or to be testing. You should already have those learnings in your pocket ready to go long before November rolls around, ensuring that you being your holiday season with winning elements in your creative that will bring you the most revenue.

If you're looking for more holiday planning resources, check out 12 Tips for a Successful Holiday Season. We've also dedicated a national event to helping retailers plan for the upcoming season. Check out the Revenue Revolution Tour which offers helpful tips and resources for your holiday planning.

Fawn Young
Marketing Strategist at Bronto

The Decline of Email Marketing Deliverability. Fact or Fiction

Chris Kolbenschlag — Thu, 17 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

A recent study by ReturnPath reported that inbox placement was dramatically down during the second half of 2011. I would like to address this report as well as report on Bronto's strong deliverability numbers we are seeing with the same reporting mechanism with our clients. ReturnPath's report was based on data from senders using their Mailbox Monitoring tool which looks at a set of test accounts. These test account email addresses are added into a client's send and then report where those test account addresses land (inbox, spam folder or missing). It is important to know that although this is a good indicator of what is going on with certain ISPs, it is only basing results on a dozen email addresses.

The report shows an inbox placement decline from 81% in the first half of 2011 down to a 76.5% inbox placement for the second half of 2011. A couple of factors could be in play here:

Timing: The second half of the year coincides with heavy sending for the holiday season and when the industry typically sees the most issues with deliverability. Due to the increase in sending, many of the ISPs filter out more legit mail to combat the increase in spam
Reputation: Some of the clients using the Mailbox Monitoring tool may not work with an Email Service Provider. Without working with an ESP who has a proven track record, the client may have historically weaker metrics.

Regardless of the cause, the drop is a concern and something we wanted to look at closer with Bronto's clients and compare.

Here at Bronto we use another provider's service similar to Inbox Monitor that reports on these test account email placements. We frequently run tests on all shared IPs and consistently see a 99% inbox and 1% spam folder placement. For dedicated IPs using
Bronto's Deliverability Monitoring service, we see a range from 91% to 99% inbox placement and 1%-9% spam folder placement depending on the client.

All these metrics are a result of client performance both good and bad. Marketers with clear permission, low complaints, low bad address rates, relevant email content and good engagement with their subscribers are going to get to the inbox more often than marketers who may not be following simple best practices.

As a marketer you control these numbers. Take a look at the State of Email Marketing Deliverability, a post I wrote recently after attending a MAAWG meeting. If you have concerns about your shared IP, check out an overview of the differences between a dedicated and a shared IP. Finally, learn ways to reduce spam complaints which hurt your deliverability.

Chris Kolbenschlag
Director of Deliverability at Bronto

In The Next 10 Minutes: Improve Your Email Program Through Perspective

Kestrel Lemen — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

We know you're busy. Marketers are always stretched for time and are constantly evaluating their tasks based on what value they provide. Given the lack of time, it's important to have quick but very valuable tactics that you can easily implement but which also provide terrific value. That's why we're starting a new series on the Bronto Blog, tactics you can read about and implement in ten minutes or less and are guaranteed to help you improve your marketing program.

In the next 10 minutes:

Set up a new email address through Gmail, Yahoo, or another non-work related ISP. Use your new address to sign up for email programs that you think do a really excellent job along with some of your direct competitors. Check this account periodically and examine what you find.

What’s the Value?

It’s easy to get tunnel vision and miss what else is going on in the email space. A very simple way to stay up to date on what’s going on is to review the email campaigns of leaders in the space and your competitors' emails! You may not have the resources that some of these companies have, but you can definitely take a harder look at what they are doing and if it can apply to your program.

Programs I recommend signing up for based on creative, CTA and subject lines:

REI
MooseJaw
Sephora
Gap
Williams-Sonoma
Fast Company

Once you start collecting email address, take a couple minutes a week during some down-time to scan through the emails. Ask yourself: what was it about the subject line that got me to open? What is it about the message that would make me want to click? Is this campaign tempting me to convert?

I also recommend signing up for your competitors' emails. Are their messages interesting? Are they sending a welcome message? What kinds of incentives are they offering up? How are they utilizing social media?

Maybe you already have some email program favorites that I haven’t listed, what are they?

Look around and see what is out there, you never know what you’ll find! This is a simple step to becoming a better marketer. Take 10 mins and do it!

Kestrel Lemen
Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Bring Them Back to Purchase: Tactics to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Kellie Boggs — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

We just completed our third annual Bronto Summit that brought together top leading marketers. If you aren’t familiar with the Bronto Summit, it’s a three-day conference that allows our Bronto clients to get together and expand their email marketing knowledge. There were many hot topics at the Summit this year, but the one that is top of mind is Shopping Cart Abandonment.

Did you know that 60-70% of carts are abandoned?

That's right, according to a new Bronto whitepaper From Abandon to Conversion, Forrester Research and MarketingSherpa reported abandonment rates of 55% and 52% respectively. SeeWhy and Fireclick show abandonment rates hovering around 72%. With abandonment being a major issue for retailers and commerce marketers, we want to take some time to review some of the ways that you can combat abandonment by bringing back customers to buy. If you're seeing a high abandonment number, don't fret! SeeWhy, a company that specializes in shopping cart recovery says abandonment is often a precursor to conversion. People don’t convert because of either

Price
They aren’t ready.

So, sending a reminder to folks that they've left something in their shopping cart is a super smart idea.

The next thing you are probably asking yourself is okay so why do visitors abandon? What can I do about it? What should I be watching out for?

These are all great questions, read on to hear what the Bronto Marketing Strategy team recommends.

Kestrel Lemen: For me the abandoned shopping cart message that has the look and feel of a check out page is the most effective. I'm a big believer in making the user experience to conversion as quick and easy as possible. By setting up the abandoned shopping cart message to have the items left in the cart with the total and a CTA that denotes "complete my checkout" makes perfect sense. If you have a recommendation engine you could also add in "other products you may like" as cross sells and up sells for the message.

Emily Keye: Abandon cart messages can be one of the highest revenue driving emails that a marketer can send. Ideally, you'd trigger this first message within 24 hours of the cart being abandoned and populate the message with the product images, names, prices, etc. of the items left in the cart. As Kestrel mentioned, you should also make it ridiculously easy for shoppers to complete their purchase. In other words, link directly back to their abandoned cart. Make sure that you're including the benefits of why someone should purchase from you. Highlighting things like: your award winning customer service team, the awesome return policy you have and your satisfaction guarantee. I would also recommend creating a sense of urgency in this message. Let the recipient know that their items are being held and their cart will expire in 10 days. This will also give you the opportunity to follow up with additional messages and create an abandon cart series.

Once you have an abandon cart message set up, you'll need to continue to test and optimize. You'll want to test the timing of the message/series. You'll need to test if the message/series performs better with discounts or without. You'll want to test the content of the message itself. Is it better to take a friendly, helpful approach, or should you just be very direct and to the point?

Fawn Young: I'd say it's very important to test the timing of your abandon cart messages. I've seen messages within the first 24 hours work great for some clients while others need to allow a couple of days before triggering the message. I recently abandoned cart at Old Navy and they didn't trigger the abandon cart message until almost a week later. By that point I had already made my purchases elsewhere. If they had triggered it within the first 24-48 hours they would have been very likely to get that revenue from me. So, in order to find the timing that works best for your abandon cart message- test, test, test!

Anna Pfeiffer: I'll simply lay out what I've seen with my clients as the most "typically" successful abandoned cart series. Not to say that this is a one-size-fits all solution by any means, but it has typically performed well for the majority of clients who have tested it.

In this series, the first message is sent out within 12-24 hours of the initial cart abandonment. As Kestrel said, it would be designed in a way that mimics the checkout page and makes completing the order very clear and simple. I typically suggest that this message not contain any offer but instead presents itself as more of a friendly reminder and service to the customer by emphasizing the fact that they are saving the items for them. To determine the timing, you should look at the average time between abandonment and purchase for those who have not been subject to any abandoned cart messages. This will give you a good idea of when to trigger the first message. Fawn pointed out that the timing is crucial!

Then, in the second message, sent 3 days after abandonment, I suggest again detailing the order information as Emily mentioned. Couple the summary with an incentive this time and also include cross sell & upsell products. I prefer not including incentives in the first message so as not to distract from the main CTA of completing the initial order. However, I think the second message is a good time to include this, especially since you are providing an offer, which makes it more worthwhile to purchase.

For the third and final message, which would go out 5 days after abandonment, it's all about creating a sense of urgency! You need to stress that the offer, as well as the cart itself, will expire soon, and give them 1-3 days to redeem. If possible, throw in an additional incentive by upping the ante with free shipping. I've seen this really make the difference between getting the conversion or not on the final abandoned cart message.

It should go without saying but just as a reminder, make sure that you're checking for conversions between each message in this series and suppressing subscribers who have purchased!

Greg Zakowicz: I agree with the rest when they say testing is key. You need to find what works best for your audience. Remember, abandonment is a sign of intent. Be sure to capitalize upon this intent. Additionally, if you offer an incentive be sure you have a method that excludes those who have already received a discount for a previous abandoned cart. You may want to limit this to one coupon every couple of months in order to avoid abuse.

The strategists make a lot of great points here and I hope you feel like you can now tackle shopping cart abandonment. For more tips on this topic, check out Emily’s blog post on 4 Ways to Drive Revenue Through Retargeting, which includes abandon cart tactics. SeeWhy research shows that with no remarketing only an average of 8% of consumers will return to buy, but with remarketing 2 to 3 times more abandoners will purchase. This equates to one in four customers returning to make a purchase. So, what’s stopping you? Follow the strategists advice & take advantage of this huge revenue driver!

Kellie Boggs
Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Email Marketing Trends for April 2012

Jim Davidson — Tue, 08 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Following the first Email Trend Report on the Bronto Blog last month, we continue monitoring the increase in email volume.

Email Volume by Day

April email volume increased over the previous month with the week of 4/23 seeing a large spike. Many brands began their strong Mother's Day campaigns.

(click to enlarge)

Email Volume by Day of Week

Mondays saw the most volume in April. Subtle shifts were seen throughout the week.

Emails Sent per Brand

The most frequent mailer sent 81 messages. Last month's most frequent sender decreased volume from 90 messages in March to only(!?!) 75 in April. Brands sent an average of 10 emails in April.

Subject Line Trends

April's longest subject line was a whopping 219 characters. That's 19 more characters than March's record holder. The subject line ends with a comma hinting that the original subject line may have been even longer.

Longest: Belle & Clive: "Bluefly presents Belle & Clive: Proenza Schouler, Gucci, Salvatore Ferragamo, Mignon, Kenneth Jay Lane, Matt and Nat, L.A.M.B., Edun, Geren Ford, Cult of Individuality, Prada, Hogan, Kevia, Sam & Lavi, Bogosse, Julieri,"

Shortest: (Tie)

Newport News: "Gotcha!"

Omaha Steaks: "Shh..."

“The Tiny Dozen” features subject lines that are 12 characters or less to give you ideas to keep it short and sweet!

The Tiny Dozen
Brand	Subject Line	Count
Newport News	Gotcha!	7
Omaha Steaks	Shhh...	7
Newport News	Get Out!	8
Newport News	Qwik Pix	8
Spiegel	Sale On!	8
Spiegel	Set Sail	8
Newport News	Bring It!	9
Newport News	Fab Faves	9
Newport News	Glam Rock	9
UrbanOutfitters.com	OMG Sale!	9
Brooks Brothers	$2,000.00?	10
Bergdorf Goodman	5F Brights	10
Newport News	Hi Lo YOLO	10
Black Fleece by Brooks Brothers	Luminosity	10
Spiegel	Luxe Looks	10
Newport News	Boho to Go!	11
Newport News	Bottoms up!	11
Brooks Brothers	Derby Ready	11
jcpenney	Do The Math	11
Spiegel	Fashion Fix	11
Spiegel	Good To Go!	11
New York & Company	Here's $100	11
Spiegel	Look sharp!	11
Newport News	Look Sharp!	11
UrbanOutfitters.com	New To Sale	11
jcpenney	Pool Party!	11
Buckle	Short Takes	11
New York & Company	TODAY ONLY!	11
Newport News	What's new?	11
Spiegel	Wild Thing!	11
Overstock.com	24-HOUR SALE	12
Overstock.com	48-HOUR SALE	12
Spiegel	Chic Choices	12
Newport News	Cool Collage	12
jcpenney	Don't Resist	12
J.Crew	Lady in pink	12
Newport News	Sheer-iously	12
Spiegel	This Just In	12
Newport News	Wear It's At	12
RitzCamera.com	Weekly Deals	12
UrbanOutfitters.com	What's News?	12

April 2012 Subject Line Word Cloud:

(click to enlarge)

Promotions

Shipping gifts to Mom contributed to the biggest M-o-M shift is the increase of free shipping promotions.

Please let me know if there are other trends that you would like to see in the monthly Email Marketing Trend reports.

Jim Davidson
Manager of Marketing Research

4 Ways to Drive Revenue Through Retargeting

Emily Keye — Tue, 01 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

We all already know how steep the competition is in your subscriber’s inbox. Consumers who are pressed for time and overwhelmed with emails only connect with content that’s relevant, timely and valuable to them.

Email retargeting campaigns are designed to persuade a customer to purchase, complete an online transaction they began but didn’t finish, replenish a previously purchased item, or purchase a complementary item. When done correctly, these campaigns are the most targeted and engaging messages you can deploy as they’re not only based on profiling attributes but also on precise customer behavior.

So what messages should you be using to retarget your email subscribers?

Remails

Remails are one of the easier retargeting concepts to append to your marketing tool kit. Remailing involves running segments to identify those recipients who did not open your message, altering the open/no-open decision factors you control, and sending the message again. Altering the subject line is the most effective, and necessary, method for re-mail success. Most of the non-openers did not find your subject line to be compelling. Remailing is fast, easy, cheap and profitable – a very rare offer in the marketing ecosystem. Start remailing…and stop leaving money on the table.

Abandon Carts/Abandon Categories/Abandon Product Pages

Abandonment campaigns are extremely effective at recouping lost revenue. When customers abandon carts, product pages, etc. you know several things about them – which products they’re interested in, you know they have a need, and you know they’re looking to make a purchase. This information makes it very easy to reach back with relevant, beneficial messaging. According to recent studies, we know that messages that leverage clickstream data, like abandoned cart and browsing recommendation messages, produce 9 times the revenue and 32 times the net profit of standard broadcast messages. 60-70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned. With high abandonment numbers, marketers need to have abandoned cart campaigns to draw back prospective buyers. For more information on the data behind abandonment and how you can combat this lost revenue, check out From Abandon to Conversion: Why Shoppers Abandon Carts and What Merchants Can Do About It.

Replenishment Campaigns

Replenishment campaigns are another type of email retargeting campaign that you should consider. Like shopping cart abandonment campaigns, you know which products the shoppers are interested in and you can estimate the buying cycle based on the average product life or past purchase behaviors. Remind your buyers to buy from you again before they just perform a simple online search and choose the lowest price instead. This strategy not only generates additional revenue, but it lengthens your customers’ lifecycles and increases their value to your organization. Reorder messages can be automated, which helps leverage the importance of the timing of reorder messages as it's important to have an accurate estimate of the time it takes to use a product. Read Time to Reorder: how to leverage the automated repurchase reminder on the Bronto Blog for more specific recommendations for these successful messages.

Product Recommendations Campaigns

Create retargeting campaigns surrounding cross-sell or upsell opportunities using your own purchase history data or a product recommendation engine to create targeted, individualized product alert messages. Because these emails are based on historical purchase data analysis, the messages are extremely accurate and highly likely to convert to a sale. Think about even incorporating these product recommendations into other promotional emails.

Don’t forget your transactional messages too! Transactional messages are a great opportunity to recommend products that complement their purchase, here are some tips for crafting that perfect transactional message.

No matter what type of email retargeting campaign you’re sending, be sure the emails are straightforward and contain one clear objective, complete the conversion. Successful behavioral retargeting email campaigns are reliant on customer data – email metrics, clickstream activity, past purchase history, and CRM data. Chances are you already have all of the data you need even if you haven’t used it in this way in the past.

Start retargeting your email subscribers now!

Emily Keye
Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Helpful Formulas for Email Marketing Analysis

Steven DuBois — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 04:00:00 +0000

In a previous post Email Metrics 101: Establish Your Baselines, we discussed some of the key metrics you want to track. Whether you're new to email marketing or a seasoned pro, it's critical to create baselines around your marketing program. Baselines are a specific value or values that can serve as a comparison or control. This is what you are going to be measuring against to answer questions like "how do this month’s email metrics compare to my overall metrics" or "how are my birthday triggered emails performing in comparison to all my other emails."

If you haven’t calculated your baselines yet, then I recommend starting with the past 30 days worth of data to use for the basis of comparison. Aggregate those metrics and then calculate the overall rates.

For those of you that have had some time to establish a baseline and you have been gathering additional data from the campaigns, what are you doing or going to do with all that data?

Get Organized

You first want to determine where to start by figuring out what to analyze:

Subject Line
Holiday Season Performance
Important results
What really matters to overall email marketing performance

Start Asking Questions

If you are not sure where to start, your company/boss/peers will most likely always want to know:

What was learned?
How much revenue was earned?
How much money was spent?
What is the ROI?

To answer these questions you need to start by analyzing some of the data. Here is a useful formula to find percentage increases and decreases to measure performance.

If you are looking to find out how this year’s numbers compare to last year’s numbers just plug them into the formula. For instance, if 2010 ended with $21K in total revenue and 2011 ended with $55K in total revenue, then 2011 had a lift of 161.9% in revenue year over year.

This formula can be really eye-opening when comparing things like:

Tests: when you try something new you can see how much better (or worse) the test performed over the baseline
Month-to-month results: how is revenue trending over time?
Different campaign types: For example, if your welcome email conversion rate is 10.4% and your average conversion rate for broadcast marketing messages is 3.2%, then your welcome message conversion rate is 225% higher.

Another great formula that I use all the time and will help you is RPE (Revenue Per Email):

Revenue Per Email (RPE) is a great and underutilized metric. In a post in ClickZ, Jeanne Jennings, hits the nail on the head with the importance and value of doing the RPE calculation.

RPE will tell you how much revenue is generated for every email you deliver. If you are not looking at RPE, start calculating it right now.

Calculate RPE for your individual emails, campaigns, segments, lists, tests, and keep watch of this metric over time. This will help you start analyzing the value in the emails you are sending.

I’ve been asked, “How can I calculate RPE if I am not tracking revenue?” If you are not tracking the traditional conversion that leads directly to revenue, then you are tracking some other kind of conversion: whether someone has downloaded a white paper, or submitted information. Try to use these numbers and apply them to the RPE to come up with some kind of “converting” metric.

Use the calculated performance and RPE data to start figuring out what is working, what is influencing success (or not) and try to inform the planning process. These observations are going to help you market in a more effective way moving forward.

If you've seen surprising results, let us know below in the comments section.

Steven DuBois

Marketing Strategist

Bigpond is Moving to Hotmail: What Does This Mean for Email Marketers?

Cathie McFarren — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Bigpond (Telstra), Australian Broadband Provider is making a big change that may affect your email marketing deliverability.

Telstra is lifting and shifting all of their 4.2 million Bigpond customer mail accounts to Hotmail, the process is going to take a while. Telstra officials say the switch will happen in 2012. Bigpond is the largest inbox receiver behind Hotmail (they were no. 1 in 2011), they represent a large part of the overall email pie. Under the deal between Telstra and Microsoft, all Bigpond customers will be required to change their username and password to ensure a smooth transition.

So, what does this change mean to senders?

Good News

The 4.2 million Bigpond customers will keep their email address, they will just need to reset their user name and password. This change will be seamless as the back end processing will be supported by Hotmail.

What to expect

We can expect a small increase in bounces for those who never moved their accounts over or from bounces caused from old active abandon addresses. Overall this is very good news for senders as Microsoft has a very solid infrastruture and senders understand their best practice recommendations. It is still unclear if complaints will come in via the current FBL process or if they will create a new FBL.

However the move to Hotmail will enable senders to capture complaints that we have not been able to get in the past. New customers who joined, updated or added additional mailboxes after February 10, 2012 will need to access their Bigpond email with Windows Live through a BigPond URL. Current customers on BigPond MyInbox Service, will need to log in here.

Changes like those at Bigpond are important for email marketers to keep up to date with. These changes can affect your email deliverability, so stay tuned to the Bronto Blog, as we'll continue to keep you posted with any major changes in the deliverability world.

Cathie McFarren
Deliverability Analyst

Email Marketing Trends for March 2012

Jim Davidson — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Welcome to my first monthly Email Marketing Trend report! Following 2011’s Black Friday & Holiday Wrap-Up reports, I am going to feature trends seen on a monthly basis. These stats should give you insight into how brands are using email marketing to speak to their customers and help guide your frequency and promotional decisions.

The data is based off over 250 brands who sell online. There are usually 2,000-4,000+ messages in the data set per month.

These reports will evolve over time so please leave any requests for additional data points in the comments section and I will let you know if it’s possible for me to include your recommendation in an upcoming report.

Email Volume by Day

Friday, March 16th saw the highest volume with 47% of brands mailing at least once during that day. Many emails included promotions centered around St. Patrick’s Day. The lowest volume day of the month was Saturday, March 3rd with only 21% of brands sending an email.

(click to enlarge)

Email Volume by Day of Week

With 19% of March’s volume, Friday was the most mailed day of the week. Saturday was the least mailed day of the week with only 9% of March’s volume.

Emails Sent per Brand

The most frequent mailer sent 90 emails for the month of March with a second place tie at 62. Brands sent an average of 12 messages for the month.

Subject Line Trends

The longest subject line of the month was 200 characters. On average brands kept their subject lines at 50 characters.

Longest: Gilt: Final Sale, John Varvatos Collection Clothing & Footwear, Original Paperbacks, Aidan Gray, Spring Staples: Sneakers, 90 Point Oregon Pinot Noir, A Few of Our Favorites and more Starts Today at Noon ET

Shortest: Bergdorf Goodman: 5F Prints

Using an insanely long subject line that is a laundry list of every brand name or promotion is easy enough to write but I have always appreciated a well written, and often clever, short subject line. To highlight those who are keeping it short, each month I will feature “The Tiny Dozen” which will feature subject lines that were 12 characters or less.

The Tiny Dozen
Subject Line	Brand	Count
5F Prints	Bergdorf Goodman	9
Lucky you	Sephora	9
Got Green?	Buckle	10
Muy Bueno!	UrbanOutfitters.com	10
Perfect 10	New York & Company	10
Color It In	UrbanOutfitters.com	11
High of $70	New York & Company	11
SHOP-A-THON	Buy.com	11
SECRET SALE	Overstock.com	11
Last Chance!	CVS/pharmacy Photo	12
40 - 60% OFF	ShopNBC	12
Weekly Deals	RitzCamera.com	12
48-HOUR SALE	Overstock.com	12
Get On Board	Buckle	12

March 2012 Subject Line Word Cloud:

(click to enlarge)

Promotions

Percentage-based promotions were used more often than dollar-based promotions in March though promotional messaging with no dollar or percentage discount was most common.

Holiday or Special Event	No. of Messages	Percent
Spring	370	12%
Easter	50	2%
"Spring Break"	32	1%
St. Patricks Day	24	1%
Daylight Savings	19	1%

Look for the April Wrap-Up Report with month-over-months shifts in early May.

Jim Davidson
Manager of Marketing Research

Ways to Increase Daily Deal Revenue through Lifecycle Messages

Kestrel Lemen — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Recently, I had a great time in London at the first Daily Deal Europe Summit, where I enjoyed meeting daily deal companies across Europe and Asia! At the conference I spoke on automated lifecycle marketing. I first asked the audience if they wanted to see messages that could perform 100, 300, 700% better than their average daily blast. Of course they did, but what were these messages and how could daily deal marketers implement them?

Let’s take a quick moment to review the what we are up against in the daily deal email space. Your audience wakes up to an overcrowded inbox everyday. You only have seconds to grab their attention! This is where automated lifecycle messages prove their value. They get contacts to open. Why? Because they are triggered off of specific events in a contact's lifecycle with you. Maybe they just purchased a deal, or just signed up on your website or maybe they have NOT purchased in a while. These are all important points in your lifecycle with them that you can utilize to drive engagement.

Important to note that these messages only require a one time set up, they work in the background and need to monitored and tweaked as needed. These messages take less time and add to your bottom line.

Let’s start with the essentials:

Welcome Message

Your first impression with the contact needs to be strong. This message sets the stage for all of your following messages.

Four things to remember with a welcome message

Introduce your self and paint a picture - this is for simple brand recognition, time to stand out and show your value. Let the contact know what they can look forward too.
BE HELPFUL – Address typical pain points, issues that could cause them to not convert (shipping/returns policy)
Inspire – Give them some EYE CANDY. Can you populate today’s deal? Perfect! If not show some other tantilizeing images!
Incentivize – You can incentivize many different ways, you can do a straight $ or % off the first purchase, or you can let them know about your rewards program and how your program incentivizes as a whole. Offering an incentive in a welcome message typically sees drastically higher open and conversion rates.

Here’s a pro tip for the welcome message: Pitch your social community, if social is something your company does well, then say it loud and proud. Contacts that connect through multiple channels have a higher chance of converting.

Birthday Message

Are you sending out a birthday message? During the conference I was shocked at how many companies were not taking advantage of this simple but effective message.

Think about it, who wants stuff on their birthday? Who usually splurges on their birthday? I know I do, and it’s typically on a product or service that a daily deal would sell (Nice dinner, massage or a trip). A fellow Bronto strategist wrote an excellent post on how effective birthday email messages can drive revenue.

Post-purchase message

Get them itching to purchase again with a post-purchase coupon/special offer. If they just purchased you are top of mind, so plant the seed for the next conversion:

3 things to remember with a post-purchase coupon:

The term ‘coupon’ can be loosely used here, if you can’t incentivize, then simply thank them and loop in your rewards program
Use a deadline to create sense of urgency if there is a coupon offered
Remind them of all the great deals they could buy

Pro tip for post purchase messages: Retarget those who don’t convert from this post-purchase message reminding them that their coupon expires soon. You can set up the rule so that these coupons only go out on the first purchase

Are any of you sending out any of these messages? If so put a link in the comments, I’d love to see them! That’s all for now. Up next, re-engaging and going up and beyond with your audience.

Kestrel Lemen
Marketing Strategist at Bronto