The Istobe eCommerce Analytics Blog

I often feel that email is the neglected step child of retail marketing. We’ve all seen the news articles and blog posts that tout sexier marketing trends like Twitter and mobile marketing. Many retailers have already jumped on the social media and company blog bandwagon and will spend months planning and implementing these changes on their website. Yet, I so often run into marketers that are willing to throw together a weekly sales email in an hour and blast the same message to their entire customer list.  Why? Well, my guess is they are underestimating the “response” they get from email. Catalogers are quick to argue that offline communications drive online purchases, but how is online communication driving offline sales?

Read Why Getting Email Marketing Right is so Important »

I read a great blog post yesterday on why aligning your SEO and targeted email strategy is important to reducing your cost of new customer acquisition. Julie Batten’s Using Search and E-mail to Acquire Customers post at Clickz has some great info in it. I pulled out the following quotes that I thought were particularly interesting:

Read Importance of Coordinating Search and Targeted Email »

I talked last time about how variable pricing is a great way to maintain your margins on sale items and I gave three general steps on how to perform variable pricing with email marketing. The gist is that each of your customers has a different value for your products and the key is to figure out how to get them each to pay closer to what they are actually willing to pay. The main takeaway is that you should give different sale discounts to different segments of your customers based on their behavior patterns - and the patterns of other customers like them - concerning discounted items. Today, I’ll take a look at the main arguments that companies have when it concerns variable pricing.

Read Variable Pricing-Based Email Marketing: 25% Less Customers Can Make you 22% More Profit »

Lets face it, the barrage of emails during the holiday season ends up developing an impenetrable amount of noise for most email users.  According to my quick sentiment analysis (Twitter and Facebook) I would say that increased, non-targeted emailing has developed a new season that is not being taken too favorably. Being opportunistic I would like to offer a new term for the season: Spamidays.   Following suit with economists I would declare that Spamidays has already begun and, unlike our recession, has a definable end date, probably the second week of January.

What data supports my thoughts?  Your inbox is probably the biggest indicator but here are a couple of supportive tweets (selected out of about 2,000 from the last 2 days):

Have other Gmail user noticed an increase in SPAM in the last few days? 153 in a day is way more than what I usually get! Holiday SPAMMING?
CrazyKinux [Reply] [Profile] - 20:31

Holiday catalog spam & junk mail is piling up. You can practically feel the desperation of the retailers this year…so much paper & email.
crystallyn [Reply] [Profile] - 10:12

Ah, the holiday season. Filling everyone’s electronic in box with extra-special spam.
textualdeviant [Reply] [Profile] - 10:30

Interesting sentiment.   Last year year’s Spam Report also confirms an ever increasing tidal wave of email over the holiday season:

‘Tis the season to be jolly, but this month’s spam levels brought little cheer to anti-spam analysts.  Overall spam levels continued to increase, accounting for nearly three out of four emails in November. To put that growth trend into perspective, in May 2007 spam accounted for approximately 64 percent of all email traffic.  Symantect 2007 Spam Report

So I have labeled the obvious but how can you ensure your email campaigns are construed as valuable and assistive and not viewed as a contributor to Spamidays?: Read Spamidays are here. Don’t be a contributor. »

With so many reports out there talking about why retailers are going to be taking such a hit this year, I thought it might be worthwhile to focus on the positive. The down economy has opened up several opportunities for retailers to try out new and interesting ways of reaching their customers.  I wanted to share a few of these with you.

• Read Surviving the Holidays: 5 Marketing Tips for Retailers »

With today’s news peppered with articles about the possible demise of Circuit City, the sinking Dow, and the continued decline in consumer spending, many companies are concerned about how their customers are going to respond to the tough times ahead. Several online retailers are already going down the discount path to try and get customers to spend their money early– well before their credit dries up. I’m sure many of you have already been hit up like I have with numerous discounts from shops that don’t typically give discounts – I’ve been surprised by the recent emails I’ve received from the likes of JCrew, a company that never seems to discount their merchandise.

Read Finding Customers Who Will Weather This Storm: Customer Segmentation in a Down Economy »

First things first, no matter who you support, I hope all of you have either gone out to vote today, or are planning to go out to vote. Although I’m usually not this dedicated, I woke up at 6:30 this morning to try and make it to the polls by 7. I was hoping I might be able to get their before the crowds, but by the time I got there at 6:55, the line was already two blocks long. I’ve voted at the same polling station for over 10 years now, and I have to admit that I’ve never seen such an incredible turn out for any election thus far. It took me about an hour to make it through, which was actually less than what I originally thought, but glad I beat the long lines I know will be there later this evening.

Read Obama Leading in the Polls? Perhaps it’s Due to Better Marketing »

Though Kevin Hillstrom believes that the low variable cost is the real factor in the “killer ROI” that email affords multi-channel retailers, I would also mention that it’s low variable cost also contributes to the low amount of effort that retailers put into their email marketing. That is, retailers don’t put the money they should behind email because they view the low variable cost - and low marginal cost - as a license to spam. The way this manifests itself in the marketplace is that spending on email optimization technology trudges behind other technological spending like, say, search engine optimization (SE0).

Read Targeted Email Campaigns Only Way to Recapture Email ROI »

Earlier this month Tim Parry argued the merits of micro-segmentation in a Multichannel Merchant article called Divide and Conquer.  The gist is that the more you can sub-divide your segments, the better you can target your message to each group resulting in higher response rates.

Read How many Customer Segments are Too Many? »

Last week, I presented some recent survey results compiled by InternetRetailer.com and eMarketer (Better than average?) that may help online retailers gauge how they compare to the “typical” online retailer. As part of my blog entry, I talked about increased competition in email marketing and the challenge of staying in front of customers as the inbox gets more crowded. InternetRetailer.com just followed up on their survey with an article detailing the steps email marketers should take to better reach their customers. I think they make some really good points, so wanted to share the article (Survey: Too much and not enough) and talk about their findings.

Read Segmentation Analysis: The First Step To Surviving Increased Competition »