Postholiday Email Campaigns to Consider
by Sherry Chiger
Published in Direct Magazine 12/6/10
If you market to consumers, you probably spent months formulating your Christmas season email strategy. But now that we’re in the thick of the shopping season, you should be turning your attention to your postholiday tactics.
“You’re going to be getting a lot of first-time buyers on your file,” says Ross Kramer, cofounder/CEO of email marketing specialist Listrak. “This is a great opportunity to look at those buyers and engage with them.”
An underused but effective tactic is to launch a “get what you really wanted” campaign. “This can really pull on the heartstrings of email recipients,” Kramer says. If you offered gift cards as a purchase incentive—“Spend more than $50 and get a gift card worth $10 off your next purchase”—this tactic can be especially useful.
To make your messaging targeted and relevant to each recipient, Kramer suggests spotlighting in your emails products that he or she might have left in an abandoned cart or included in his or her wish list. If you don’t have that information, “a person’s onsite behavior is one of the best indicators of their buying behavior,” Kramer says. The extra effort is worth it: “Tying to products in an email will drive very high response rates,” he adds.
After the holidays is also a good time to promote add-on items in targeted emails. If you have customers who bought game consoles from you, for instance, you could send them follow-up emails promoting applicable games and accessories. If there aren’t any obvious add-ons to promote, use collaborative filters (“people who bought X also bought Y”) to look at what other customers who purchased those same items also bought, and highlight those products in your emails.
And of course January is a great time to offer discounts or free shipping on excess inventory. This can be especially effective when targeting gift card recipients: “The timing is right because they have the gift card in hand,” Kramer notes.
According to a SeeWhy study cited in Listrak’s white paper “Post Holiday Email Campaigns,” last year cart-abandonment rates peaked on Jan. 5 and 6 at 87%. High shipping costs are a prime cause of abandoned carts, so extending free shipping offers can reduce increase conversions. To minimize the hit to your bottom line, tie the free shipping to a spending threshold. If your average order value is $50, try offering free shipping on orders of at least $60.
“Large tier-one retailers are doing a lot of these things,” Kramer says. “Here’s an opportunity for tier-two and tier-three retailers to take a cue from larger retailers.”