How to Use Social Proof in Email and on Your E-commerce Site

Retailers constantly seek ways to stand out in crowded inboxes and influence subscribers to make purchases, some of them by offering deep discounts. But for companies that either can’t or don’t want to shrink their margins, finding another way to influence purchase decisions inside emails is essential. This is where using social proof in your email marketing can be a powerful sales tactic.

Luckily for companies — especially online retailers — they already possess a lot of content that can be used for social proof. Here are a few ways retailers can utilize this content in their email marketing programs to influence purchases.

How to Use Product Reviews in Email Marketing

Product reviews matter to consumers. Sixty-five percent of consumers check product reviews before making a purchase. When it comes to Gen Z, 67% of them read three or more reviews before making their first purchase. You’ve worked hard at collecting reviews, and now it’s time to put them to good use.

Look at the elements of product reviews you can use, including the actual rating, customer quote, and even a piece of user-generated content (UGC), like a picture or video. From here, you can use these elements to showcase top-rated products for different categories or sets of products. Using one or all of the elements can make the customer feel confident in their decision to purchase from you.

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Here’s an example from HalloweenCostumes.com that combines all of these elements in the recovery section of the email.

A great part about using product reviews in emails is that they fit well in a variety of email messages, from promotional emails to automated lifecycle messages like a welcome series or abandoned cart messages.

How to Use Social Media in Email Marketing

Social media provides a brand with the ability to engage in back-and-forth communication with consumers. It has also given brands a new outlet to let customers advertise and spread brand awareness for them. When someone shares a picture using a brand’s product on social media, it provides some level of brand and product credibility.

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Secondary content:  Include user-submitted photos as secondary content in each of your emails. You can even start a hashtag to showcase how customers use your products, such as in this example from Crocs.

In this email, the main content is their standard promotion creative, but they use UGC as secondary content to showcase how these products fit into their customers’ lifestyles.

Entire email: UGC does not have to be reserved for secondary content. As you can see in this example from Gone For A Run, the entire email is built by featuring a few of their customers from social media. Using customer photos like this provides an easy — and relatable — method for promoting products.    

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Influencers: We can’t talk about social media and not mention influencer marketing. If you do use influencers, find ways to incorporate them into your email promotions.

You can do this by creating an email where they showcase products, such as their favorites or top trends. And when it makes sense to do so, consider putting messages like these into your lifecycle messaging series.

Top posts: Monitor your social feed for your most engaging posts. If a specific post receives more than the average number of likes or comments, you know it has engaged your audience — use these actual posts in of your messages.

If an outfit posted on Instagram is popular, feature that post in your emails with a screenshot of the actual post or show the outfit itself. Using screenshots or referencing the social media post might prove more effective as it directly ties the social aspect to the promotion.

How to Use Your Employees in Email Marketing

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Customers trust your employees. Whether walking into a sporting goods store or a wine retailer, employee recommendations are trusted. This trust can be a powerful sales tool, so find ways to incorporate your employee product recommendations into your email marketing.

You can see in this example from REI that they humanize the email by showing staff pictures, names, locations, and quotes about why they recommend the products.

One great place to use recommendations like this is with browse recovery emails. Showcasing employee recommended products for the same category of products subscribers were viewing on their website can be a great tool in helping the customer decide on a product to purchase.

The Social Proof is in the Pudding

Using social proof to drive email conversions works. One company tested this by isolating website browsers based on the category of products viewed. They sent these consumers a “top-rated products” email based on that specific category and sent other non-category browsers a generic marketing message.

The social proof-driven message saw significant increases in all major email metrics, including an almost 8,000 percent lift in revenue per email. Even better, this email had only 3% of the volume of emails sent compared to the generic message — but it drove 140% more revenue.

Social proof comes down to finding the right opportunities to incorporate it. Look to your social networks, product reviews, and your employees to serve as proof for why they should purchase from your brand.

Trust me, they’re open to suggestions.

Read more of my thoughts on using social proof here

Data Dive: How to Personalize Email & Navigation for Maximum Impact

Segmentation data is an essential element of delivering relevant email messages, but deciding which pieces of information to use can present challenges. And how do you personalize emails when you have too little information, such as with new email subscribers?

For email marketers, finding opportunities to collect background on your customer can deliver a more personalized email experience. While this information exists for every retailer — whether they sell apparel, footwear, jewelry, or insects — marketers often overlook customer background data widely available to them.

Stop ignoring the information in front of you and start segmenting your email subscribers by focusing on some behavior-based alternatives.

Collecting Background at Sign-up

There are some surprisingly simple ways to collect useful, usable information from new subscribers at the onset. Look no further than the email subscription process. Asking for a single piece of data on the actual sign-up form, such as gender or product size, provides an immediate segmentation opportunity.

Here’s how. Imagine you are an apparel retailer selling clothing for both men and women. Capturing their gender allows you to send a welcome email tailored to that specific gender. You can personalize with different hero images, navigation links, secondary content and product recommendations.

If your company sells both B2B and B2C, consider asking which group the subscriber falls into. Options like this exist for most retailers — you just need to decide which piece of information makes the most sense for your brand.

You can also capture the product category the user signs up from. For example, if a subscriber is viewing engagement rings on your site and then decides to sign up for your emails, knowing this information can help you tailor your welcome messages for this subscriber while providing a different set of messages to shoppers browsing watches.

Beyond the Simple Navigation Bar

Your email navigation bar holds a lot of value for collecting segmentation data, because clicking on navigation links tells you a lot about customers’ immediate interests. But capturing and using segmenting data is about more than just customizing navigation bars, it is about making all emails more relevant.

When an email subscriber clicks on any link inside of an email, their behavior tells a story. Your job is to help them navigate it. Here are some effective ways to provide them a more personalized storyboard.

Using Non-Traditional Navigation Bars

Traditionally, navigation bars contain links to a brand’s primary product categories — but they don’t have to. Consider what other types of links inside of your emails might be useful for customizing messaging.

For example, knowing a customer’s shoe size might be helpful for a footwear retailer. Instead of including links to your primary categories, you could instead link by shoe size. Then, you could segment subscribers by the size they indicated when clicking on a particular link. This would allow the marketer to use dynamic content in future emails, such as using a more traditional navigation bar with size-filtered links.

In this scenario, subscribers who click on the size 6 link in the navigation bar are placed into the size 6 segment. In future emails, the navigation bar has more traditional links, such as links to dress and casual shoes. However, when the subscriber clicks on the dress shoes link it would direct them to the dress shoes landing page, but with the products already filtered to size 6.

This is just one example of using navigation bars for the sole purpose of gathering customer background. Whether it’s shoe size, dress size, or type of pet, think of ways your brand can apply this same segmentation and email strategy.

Lifecycle Messages

Automated lifecycle messages outperform promotional messages because they’re based on customer action, like an email sign-up. And when customers sign up for your email program, they often plan to make a purchase soon, from either you or someone else.

Using some of the data already mentioned, you could send the subscriber a more relevant welcome message. But instead of sending a generic message two, three and four, you could use click-behavior inside of the emails themselves to customize subsequent messages.

Let’s use the apparel retailer from the earlier example. They capture gender at sign-up and send a gender-specific welcome message. But, instead of sending a generic second message in the welcome series, they could use click behavior from the welcome message to determine the next message.

For those who click the “jeans” link in the welcome message, they would receive a jeans-focused email that helps them select the right style and fit; it could even showcase some customer favorites. For those who click on swimwear, they would receive messaging around the hot new styles for the season and swim accessories like cover-ups.

And that manage preference message so many retailers send during the welcome series? It’s likely no longer needed now that you’ve collected some of this very same information.

This type of click-based messaging can apply to a variety of lifecycle messages, such as birthday, lapsed-purchase, browse recovery, and post-purchase messages.

Promotional Emails

Using this information in everyday promotional messages is also manageable. Even though the main content of the email may be generic (e.g. 30% sitewide sale), you can cater secondary content in each email to the individual based on these same data points.

For those in category-specific segments, like swimwear (either from sign-up, click, browse, or purchase), you can show swimwear banners or product recommendations. For those in particular size, gender, or customer categories, you can them content most appropriate for them.

Go Get Started

With a good marketing platform, this information is at every marketer’s fingertips and can easily be used by even the most time-strapped email marketer. If done well, you should expect these more relevant messages to increase conversions.

How to Start Segmenting Your Emails

I receive hundreds of marketing emails each day, and I immediately notice how much, or little, segmentation is in a company’s email strategy. Consumers increasingly expect more relevant emails from retailers, but too few actually take the time to segment their emails — even just a little.

From my experience, the reasons for the lack of segmentation usually center on time and resources — too few people handling email and not enough time to execute the strategy. With only two people in the email department, it isn’t realistic to consistently send seven varieties of messages each time.

But that doesn’t mean a company can’t segment their emails. They just need to start in a manageable way and grow from there.

You have to start somewhere

Companies need to understand the obstacles that prevent them from achieving a consistent segmenting strategy. Is it the lack of time needed to segment, lack of data, or the marketing tool’s ability to segment? Maybe it’s not knowing where to start.

Should someone start with segmenting lifecycle messages or promotional messages? While there are a lot of ways to segment lifecycle messages, I find most companies struggle most with segmenting the day-to-day promotional messages.

But they don’t have to. Here are three simple segments any retailer, regardless of the resources available, can use to begin their email segmentation strategy.

Isolate your recent purchasers

Create a segment of those who recently purchased from you, say within the last five days, and withhold them from promotional sends. This can be a great first step in creating a better customer experience.

Rather than asking someone who just purchased from you (especially if it is their first purchase) to immediately buy more, you provide them a few days break from the promotional email onslaught. This gives them time to be excited about their purchase while not treating them like you do the person who has never purchased from you.

Pro tip: To keep these people engaged, and potentially purchase again, create dedicated post-purchase messaging for your recent purchasers. These messages can improve the overall customer and brand experience and generate significant revenue.

Isolate your non-openers and non-purchasers.

Create a segment of contacts who have both not opened an email in a given time (e.g. six months) and have also never purchased, as this behavior indicates a lack of interest in your brand or products. Begin to withhold this segment from some promotional sends.

This can be a permanent suppression until you have a non-opener re-engagement campaign automated, or simply a reduction in cadence (two emails per week instead of five). Doing so can provide a variety of benefits, including:

• Better reporting: When you send emails to non-openers your email open rates are being artificially dragged down and you’re not getting a true measure of how they perform. This is especially important if you are doing subject line testing. While one subject line may look to be outperforming another, having a large number of non-openers in one group may make it appear as if one is performing worse than it is.

• Deliverability: Sending to consistent non-openers can have a negative impact when it comes to inbox deliverability. ISPs like Gmail look at these engagement rates as a factor in determining whether your email makes it to the inbox or spam folder. Be smart about who you’re sending emails to.

• Acquisition source: Try to identify a common theme in acquisition source for these contacts. Did the majority come in from a sweepstakes or from a social promotion? Being able to identify an acquisition source that has a higher-than-average non-response rate can help you prepare a targeted strategy for this set of subscribers moving forward.

Pro tip: Create a never-purchased series for new email subscribers who haven’t made their first purchase. For example, you could automate a series of messages around the four-week mark for new subscribers if they have not made a purchase reinforcing your competitive differentiators, and maybe even offer a steeper discount to entice the first purchase.

Find your customers

Create a segment of your customers. This could be all of your customers, only repeat purchasers, those who have spent over a certain dollar amount, or some other criteria that makes sense for your organization.

You may want to include some factor of recency to this segment. For instance, if a contact has purchased five times from you but has not purchased in the past two years, should they be included? In most cases, probably not. But again, this would be company specific.

When sending emails to these contacts make them feel appreciated. Here are a couple of ways:

• Thank them: Create a small banner at the top of each email recognizing them as a customer and thanking them. This could easily be appended at the top of each email using dynamic content or easily inserted into a duplicate message.

• Offer exclusivity: If you have an upcoming sale, consider giving this segment early access and let them know they are receiving this early access. This can make them feel appreciated and also provides a sense of urgency to make a purchase. You can also run specific sales just for your past customers, such as a flash sale. Again, let them know the sale is just for them.

Pro tip: Consider touting these email-only offers as part of your enticement for joining, or staying a part of, your email program. This can give subscribers a reason to not only remain subscribed but also continue opening your emails — which we know can help inbox placement.

With each of these examples, the segments are not only easy to create but the strategy is also easy to execute consistently, even for those with fewer resources. Even if the segmentation strategy consists more of not sending emails to specific groups than creating new messages, that’s not a bad thing. Many times, an email not sent is better than an irrelevant email.

Email segmentation is important, and you need to start somewhere. Don’t be overwhelmed. Starting in a manageable way will help you feel more comfortable doing it and can help identify roadblocks to further advancing your segmentation efforts.

Removing these roadblocks will help your email team become more efficient, which will ultimately help you drive even more revenue from your email program.

After all, isn’t that the goal?

Keys to Creating a Gen Z-Friendly Email Marketing Strategy

The eldest Gen Z, the generational cohort following millennials, will turn 22 this year. Like all generational cohorts, they have attributes unique from those before them, but Gen Z does have a first: They’re true digital-natives. They have never known a world without the internet, smartphones, social media and Amazon.

This means they instinctively know how to use their phones to find information, search for products, interact with others, and check their email. In fact, 83% expect to increase or maintain their email usage over the next five years.

If Gen Z makes up part of your target audience, you need to know how to effectively market to them on all channels, including email.

Mobile Matters

Sixty-one percent of Gen Z use smartphones five or more hours each day, and 35% use them between 1-4 hours a day. So being mobile-first is a must! This could mean a lot of different things, but to keep it simple, avoid creating a need to side-scroll and pinch-and-zoom messages, and create clear calls-to-action (CTA).

Your messages should not only be mobile-friendly, but also visually appealing. With the top social channels for Gen Z being image-first, your emails should follow suit. Expecting subscribers to read paragraphs of text is a surefire way to get your emails deleted, or maybe worse, ignored.

Social Media and Social Proof

Social Media: Gen Z trusts social media, so if they can’t find you on social media, they are going to be less trusting of you.

According to CivicScience, when it comes to media influence, 53% of Gen Z say comments on social media, compared to internet or TV ads, have the most influence on a purchase.

Finding ways to incorporate social media into your emails can help build trust and engagement. Here are a few ways to incorporate social into your email marketing:

Ask them to share. Instead of sending an email asking subscribers to follow your brand, ask them to share their photos of your product using a designated hashtag.

This will allow you to showcase your customers, build user generated content (UGC), increase engagement, and expand your reach. You can include a secondary or tertiary section in each email that constantly promotes content sharing.

Showcase most “liked” products in posts. Look no further than your social sites for the most liked images or videos. If your pale-green sweater has more likes than other social posts, highlight the sweater post, along with the like-count, inside your emails.

Your consumers are telling you what they like. Listen to them.

Use influencers in your emails. Gen Z likes influencers. In fact, 46% of them follow 10+ influencers on social media. Create an influencer-themed email that showcases specific influencer picks, or complete sets like an outfit.

Then look for other areas where you can repurpose some of this content. This can include a “complete the look” post-purchase message for those who purchased a featured item, or secondary content highlighting an influencer’s “pick of the week.”

Social Proof: Obtaining UGC is one thing — using it is another. Using UGC in your marketing can provide social proof for consumers and can have a powerful influence on sales.

Consider this: 30% of Gen Z say a real customer, as opposed to an influencer, athlete, or celebrity, is more likely to persuade them to try a new brand.

Consider these tactics to enhance social proof:

Use UGC. If you are collecting selfies or product images, be sure to use that content in your emails. If you are asking for, and collecting, consumer photos, you can utilize that content within other emails on the same topic. For example, a clothing retailer asking for selfies can use the images with sweaters for sweater-related emails.

Use customer reviews. Sixty-seven-percent of Gen Z read three or more reviews before making a first purchase. Use this to your advantage by including reviews in your emails.

You can create stand-alone emails featuring top-rated products and even include a review quote along with each product. For secondary content, consider including a UGC photo alongside the review, and feature the photo and quote below the main content of the email. Again, the possibilities are virtually limit-less.

Employee recommendations. Finally, use your own employees. Similar to a top-rated email, but instead showcasing your employees’ top picks. This will give you an opportunity to put a personal face to your brand and give your emails a more personal feel. After all, who knows your products better than your own staff?

Highlight Causes

Gen Z expects brands to be more involved in social causes, with 69% being more likely to buy from a company that contributes to such causes. As a retail strategy, you commonly see this displayed with a one-for-one model, where a company donates to a social cause with every purchase. Take Oracle Bronto customer TOMS, which built a business on this model of giving.

TOMS’ End Gun Violence Together Campaign included a stand-alone email asking subscribers to complete a simple form, which generated postcards sent to their local representatives asking for universal background checks.

Once completing the form, the confirmation email asked people to share their cause with others on social media. The campaign went viral and resulted in owner Blake Mycoskie appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, creating even more brand exposure.

Look for other ways your company can show that it does good – and means it. By navigating to the TOMS website, and others with similar models, you can see dedicated sections showcasing the good that comes from each purchase. This content can be an email goldmine when it comes to Gen Z.

Using this content inside an email can be done a variety of ways. If you have figures or stories showcasing the tangible good being done, include this as stand-alone or secondary content in messages.

For stand-alone content, a welcome and post-purchase series makes the most sense. For secondary content, a section can be added to other lifecycle messaging, such as birthday messages, or in day-to-day promotional messages.

These sections provide constant reinforcement of the value of making a purchase and can be a great tool for building an emotional connection with Gen Z customers.

Tying It All Together

Finding ways to use and combine these elements can make your email marketing more effective for this unique, and still maturing, generation.

Make no mistake, even though they are young, they possess a lot of spending power, both direct and indirect. At the end of the day, whether it is Gen Z, millennials, or Gen X, basic marketing principles still apply – make it easy for the consumer to engage and purchase, and they’ll love you for it.

Want to Win Back Lapsed Purchasers? Focus on Customer Experience

Lapsed-purchaser campaigns, also known as win-back campaigns, are a staple in many retailers’ email marketing programs. These automated emails are sent to past purchasers who have not repurchased in a certain period of time, and the strategy typically consists of several incentivized messages that often increase in value from one email to the next.

Time and time again, I see retailers consider these messages a high priority. And for whatever reason, they’re almost always deemed a much higher priority than implementing post-purchase messages.

There’s a fundamental flaw with this approach: Retailers assume loyalty comes with every purchase. But they shouldn’t. A one-time purchaser is not a customer, and a repeat customer is not necessarily loyal. These assumptions result in retailers waiting for customers to lapse before engaging them. By then, that customer may be lost for good.

Before focusing on how to win back lapsed purchasers, retailers should step into the shoes of their customers and evaluate their purchase experiences. This helps retailers become more proactive in identifying areas which may cause customers to stray. Retailers can then work to transform these deficiencies into value-adds that make customers want to return to their brand.

Three ways to become a more proactive retailer

1. Create Personal Customer Experiences

Customers are most engaged with brands at the time of purchase, but they often receive promotional emails the day after they make a purchase. Promotional messaging at this stage holds little, if any, value for them. Not only will this not help create loyalty, but it may be enough to persuade them to ignore your emails moving forward.

What you may find is that promotional emails sent the day after a purchase have a 60% open rate – along with a 1% click rate and zero conversions. The open rate is indicative of the customer’s temporary high engagement with your brand. But because they just purchased, the click and conversion metrics are significantly low because the message holds little-to-no value for them. They may now assume any future messages will also not be valuable and may choose to ignore your subsequent emails.

Think about how you can create effective post-purchase messaging to improve the customer experience. This messaging will help nurture the customer and provide a more personal customer experience.

2. Customer First Service & Policies

Lacking customer service and customer-friendly policies can cause shoppers to stray from your brand. This could come in the form of friendly and helpful store associates or customer service reps, customer-first return policies, satisfaction guarantees, or otherwise.

An example of this is when I was once gifted an electronics product. One day, the display screen went gray. It clearly wasn’t fixable. Although this happened beyond the one-year warranty period, I contacted the company to see if there were any last-ditch troubleshooting steps I could take. The customer service rep politely walked me through their procedures and confirmed the unit was a goner. Unprovoked, they told me to email my address to them and they’d send a replacement unit. I did not ask, nor did I expect it.

I was floored by their level of service, and I have since purchased more of their items as gifts and recommended their products to others. I won’t even consider looking at another company for products like this in the future.

3. Get the Most out of a Purchase

Buying something is great but getting the most out of it is just as important. Being proactively helpful can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Proactively showcasing how a customer can care for a product (e.g. washing instructions), or better use the product (e.g. how-to instructions) will likely result in higher customer satisfaction with their purchase experience, the product, and your brand.

Retailers with brick-and-mortar locations should think about how they can connect online and in-store purchases. Using email to drive purchasers in-store can be a great way to add to the customer experience. For instance, if you sell eyewear, you may want to send emails reminding the purchaser of free in-store lens cleaning and adjustments. Your physical store surely offers something of value for the customer, such as free returns, in-store stylists, upgrade trade-ins or otherwise. Identify what those are and start connecting the online-offline customer experience.

I recently spoke to a seasonal goods retailer who sells high-end, made-to-last Christmas trees. Their customer service department constantly received a high volume of calls from recent customers asking how to properly fluff their trees. They took these inquiries and turned them into a dedicated post-purchase email message sent to new tree purchasers. This resulted in a decrease in customer service inquiries, higher email engagement, and increased customer satisfaction.

Never Lose Sight of the Customer

Retailers should never assume customer loyalty. They should focus on all aspects of the customer journey, especially within an email program. Lapsed-purchase messaging has its place in email marketing programs and can be an effective tactic, but it is not a stand-alone strategy.

Retailers should automate messaging that nurtures the consumer at each stage, from welcome messages and cart abandonment to lapsed-purchase messaging, to provide a more personalized brand experience.

These positive purchase experiences are some of the things that can keep customers loyal, not deep discounts and batch-and-blast messaging.

What’s Your Email Discounting Strategy?

Marketers have come to rely on discounts to spur purchases on, but poor coupon management eats into margins and trains customers to wait or shop around. According to eMarketer, 57% of mobile smartphone users will use a mobile coupon, and 53% of tablet users will regularly use mobile coupons to make purchases. Retailers beware! There is a fine line between discounts being used as a promotional tool and as a crutch.

Smart marketers care about brand perception and know site-wide discounts needlessly risk long-term profitability for short-term revenue gains. Personalizing the experience for every customer will help your promotions stand out, drive conversions, and boost your bottom line.

Instead of continuing to offer your consumers promotions for the sake of promotions, your focus should be on understanding the impact of your discounting strategy. Until you do a deep discount analysis of your incentives, you’ll never be able to fully determine how much money you are needlessly giving away. Retailers need to start focusing on their discounts and put together a plan to track and test incentives and redemptions.

Segment, Test, and Track

To determine how your discounts are working across your customers, begin segmenting your consumers. Create segments made up of non-purchasers, one-time purchasers, and repeat-purchasers. You can also do this with a variety of other variables and combinations, such as by customer AOV, time since last purchase, and gender to name a few.

When sending emails, send your current promotional messages to these segments. Measuring the performance of these discounts will help you get a better view of the conversion effectiveness. Even if you are not testing different incentives, knowing how your current customers are redeeming coupons can provide insight into what to test later. The same principles apply to any social ads you may run.

Knowing how your coupons are being applied across different segments gives you general baselines to measure against. Once you feel confident in how these different segments are responding, it’s time to begin testing incentives.

Create multiple incentives and test into each of these segments. You may find out that 10% off performs better than 15% off, or that 15% off performs better than 20%. Maybe you will find out a small discount with a higher minimum spend threshold performs the best. Whatever the case, you’ll get a clearer view of how your customers respond which will help protect margins.

Moving in the Right Direction

Knowing you don’t need to give away the bank to acquire sales can impact many parts of your marketing strategy, such as website email or SMS acquisition, paid search, social ads, and (of course) email marketing strategy. For emails, discounting smarter in not only your day-to-day promotional messages but your automated messages can have a meaningful impact.

For example, if you know X incentive can acquire and convert new email subscribers at a higher rate, your email acquisition strategy can be adjusted to meet this. If you discover that men are more likely to purchase with slightly deeper discounts while women are focused more on style and respond better to shipping speed, the welcome message discount can be adjusted based on the corresponding product pages where the new subscriber was acquired from.

Discounting smarter from the onset can help set expectations for your consumers. This will allow you to discount less, or not at all, in day-to-day emails and other automated messages like post purchase or cart abandonment messages. This will allow your brand to home in on what separates it from competitors, like customer service and other brand values.

Ultimately, understanding what your audience responds to allows you to apply these practices across your online marketing channels. By reducing the reliance on heavy discounts to drive sales, you’ll be able to provide consumers with what they have come to expect (discounts) while focusing on the actual value and benefits your company has to offer.

Deep discounting kills margins. It is not a sustainable business strategy. It’s time to start discounting smarter, not deeper.

Creating a Post-Purchase Email Strategy with Simple, Smart Segmentation

Let’s talk about 2019 email marketing planning. When you sit down with your marketing director and they you how to increase email revenue by five-plus percent, increase your repeat customer rate, and slow customer churn; what’s your answer going to be? It can’t be to just, “send more email.”

To achieve sustainable success means you will have to create and optimize different aspects of your email marketing program. If you’re looking for a good place to start, might I suggest focusing on a post-purchase message strategy?

When it comes to post-purchase email marketing, it is a severely underutilized yet powerful tactic. A strategic, well-thought-out series will impact your day-to-day promotional email strategy and lifecycle messages, and it can do all three things your marketing director asked of you above.

Here’s why.

A Little Context

The model of the customer journey that resembles a straight line from consumer to purchase, with some marketing tactics dotting the line between the bookends, no longer exists. Today’s consumers have more choice than ever. They shop on a variety of different channels, oftentimes during the same purchase. They are always connected, meaning they’re exposed to more influences and distractions, and they expect more personalization from marketers.

Today’s customer journey model looks more like something produced with the old-fashioned Spirograph toy, with lines that zig, zag, intersect, and circle back multiple times over. It’s a mess. And here’s where it gets even more complicated: when a consumer makes a purchase, they are simply recycled back into this complex and crazy customer journey.

How are companies expected to secure repeat customers, much less create loyalty and advocacy?

Here’s an everyday example. Have you ever made an online purchase only to receive one, two, or even three promotional emails the following day? Yep, me too. Let me translate this interaction. “Thanks for your money. We don’t know who you are, and we don’t care if, or what, you bought from us. We just want you to buy some more stuff, today.”

Does this scenario help create loyalty? Does it help create advocacy? Does it make the customer feel valued? Does it provide any reason whatsoever to immediately think of your brand the next time they decide to buy?

The first step to go about treating customers as people and not commodities is to understand how your customers are actually interacting with your emails. Only until you understand this can you strategically design an effective post-purchase messaging strategy.

Here are some ways to begin the process of creating a strategy that cultivates a stronger brand-customer relationship.

Segment Your Customers for Everyday Sends

One of the commonly-cited challenges of creating post-purchase messaging is time and resources. This is often the same reason retailers don’t segment their daily promotional emails.

Segmenting and setting up automation aren’t hard to execute. Creating the excess email creative can be. So, before you jump head-first into creating post-purchase messages, start by using easy-to-execute segmentation alongside your daily emails. This can help determine how your emails are impacting your customers and will lay the foundation for your post-purchase campaign.

To begin, create segments of your current email subscribers to determine what portion of your list has made zero, one, two, and three purchases; and how many have purchased within the past 12 months (I am using three purchases and 12 months as examples — this will change based on your products sold). Doing this will give you a better idea of the makeup of your overall email list.

Next, create segments for purchasers based on last order date. For the first month after purchase, you can break these contacts down in one-week increments. For example, one segment would be for contacts who purchased within the past seven days, one for 8-14 days, and so on. Month two and three can live independently as an entire month. Group month 4-12 together and finish off with 12+ months. Repeat this for each group of total number of purchases, stopping at a number that makes sense for your business.

Turning Buyers Into Repeat Buyers

Now that you’re equipped with some purchase-related segments, send your promotional emails as you normally would. But instead, send to these segments. Now you will be able to see how these messages performed with each customer group. What do you notice? You might find that recent purchasers have a 60% open rate within the first week after purchase.

While that might sound good, if they don’t click or convert you wasted an opportunity to engage them. You may find these contacts are unsubscribing at much higher rates, likely because they are being asked to buy again and are receiving irrelevant messages.

Looking at this data can inform the decisions as to how to construct your post-purchase messaging. If you know customers are engaging, but not purchasing, within the first 10 days post-purchase, this signals the time period you can engage them with meaningful messages, such as with “thank you” and product care messages. How does this behavior shift for first-time, repeat buyers, and won-back customers? What messages would matter to each of these customers at these moments?

Pay attention to the ripples. If you find repeat purchases are happening five months after purchase but your win-back campaign is sending at four months since last purchase, you should adjust that win-back strategy. Consider sending a message or two at two months for first time purchasers just to check in and ask if there is anything they need.

Is your win-back strategy effective for first-time customers or only for repeat customers? Maybe you’re trying to win back a customer you haven’t actually won. Use post-purchase messaging to help win them over and save the win-back for when they truly lapse.

What’s Your Answer?

Ultimately, the answer you are trying to uncover is what will make the customer feel better about your brand and their experience. It will likely come back to how often the customer buys to start with.

If your average customer makes a purchase 2.7 times per year, what’s going to drive the third purchase and beyond? If they haven’t reached the threshold of the “average” customer, you have not won them. They need to be nurtured, not “won back” with deep discounts.

Understanding how your day-to-day email marketing messages impact your customers is critical. Ask for help if needed. If you don’t have internal resources to draw upon, find an email partner, like Oracle Bronto, that offers execution or strategic professional services in-house.

A former client of mine once activated a three-message, non-incentivized post-purchase series designed to engage, help, and inform recent purchasers. These emails accounted for less than one percent of their yearly email sends yet drove nearly five percent of their yearly email revenue.

They got their five percent. How will you get yours?

How Much is Your Email Program Costing You?

We hear about how machine learning and artificial intelligence have reshaped email marketing but lurking inside these buzzwords is a hidden danger – not knowing whether these tools, among others, actually improve your email program.

Email marketers should understand their current KPIs and capabilities. Does their email marketing include batch-and-blast and segmented promotional emails? What about welcome series, post-purchase, and abandoned cart emails? What’s the revenue-per-email for each type of campaign? It’s hard to quantify results without these efforts.

Already executing these campaigns? Nice job. Now it’s time to focus on improving your email fundamentals and understanding the cost of not doing so.

Here are two examples of how improving the fundamentals of your email program can generate more revenue.

Welcome Messaging

Implementing a welcome series is an industry best practice. These messages introduce new subscribers to your brand, products and value props. But in most cases, every subscriber receives the same messages. Shouldn’t who they are and what they’re interested in determine the type of messages they receive?

Utilizing a single piece of data collected at signup (e.g. gender) and incorporating click behavior within the message allows for more personalized messaging experiences. For example, a woman who signed up to receive emails from a clothing retailer and then clicked on the maternity link within the welcome email would receive a gender-specific welcome message along with subsequent maternity-focused emails. As for her husband, if he filled out the same sign-up form but clicked on graphic tees within the welcome email, he would then receive subsequent gender and product-related messaging.

One Bronto client performed this type of click-based welcome messaging. Their targeted, click-based version represented only 3% of their email volume, yet drove 140% more revenue. There is a cost for not improving your email marketing fundamentals.

More Relevant Cart Abandonment

It’s estimated that the majority of consumers (87%) abandon their shopping carts. This is why an abandoned cart email strategy is so important for retailers. But much like batch-and-blast messages, they hope their messages relate to the masses rather than the individual.

Although these messages are extremely profitable, their fundamentals can be improved. The majority of abandoned carts are due to cost or availability of products elsewhere, according to eMarketer.

As a marketer, this matters to me. I want to know why they abandoned. Abandonment messaging that considers data points like cart total, specific products, category of products, or their purchase history allows me to create more relevant messages that entices website visitors to complete their purchase.

For example, if I know products in the cart are on sale and the sale ends in 24 hours, the abandoned cart messaging should have a sense of urgency. If the cart total is significant, messages highlighting satisfaction guarantees and return policies could help convert the consumer. If the product has other variables, such as installation and haul-away services, these details can be highlighted in the message.

One company wanted to improve their cart conversions by sending a fourth abandoned cart message. They found that the fourth message drove 15% of their yearly total abandoned cart revenue. By not improving the fundamentals this was money otherwise left on the table.

Improving the brand experience

Implementing and improving email fundamentals not only enhances the effectiveness of your email marketing program, but also provides your customers with a better overall brand experience. This can go a long way in building loyal customers.

As your email program becomes more advanced, you can add more robust strategies and technologies. When you do, you’ll have a better understanding of how your new tools are impacting your email marketing program.

If you’re not actively working to improve your email marketing fundamentals, then there’s a question you should ask yourself: how much is it costing your business?

Primed: How Amazon Finally Converted Me

If you know me or have ever listened to The Commerce Marketer Podcast, you know I am not a Prime member.

Until now. Dun dun dun.

I know, right? I spend my life analyzing the ecommerce world, ordering my products online, and yet I rebuffed all of Amazon’s attempts to draw me in. But the scale finally tipped. It was slow and gradual. I saw the writing on the wall. I finally got to the point where I could no longer rationalize not subscribing. This was years in the making. But in all of this, there is a lesson for retailers to learn from my journey.

So, what took me so long to sign up, and what changed? Let’s explore.

Why Not Prime?

Why was I so resistant to Prime? It’s not like I didn’t shop on Amazon, but, frankly, the value I received compared to my lifestyle did not match. Like other consumers, I have come to expect free shipping. While Prime offers a lot more than free shipping, I always viewed it as paying for shipping. People commonly point to the free shipping as a main reason for subscribing.

Competition with Amazon also benefits non-Prime members. Consumers today have options: If I needed items in a relative hurry, Target and Walmart would often get it to me within two days. Many times, it would arrive the next day. If I needed something that day, I would just run out and grab it. And, not to be forgotten, prices on Amazon were frequently higher — sometimes drastically — than elsewhere. Every time I would see this it would cause me to take pause on a free trial.

Were there times I would have liked one-hour delivery? Sure. But those occasions were more the exception rather than the rule.

And those extras, like Prime Video – I didn’t need them. I have Netflix, a television package, Apple TV, and Roku devices at home. I also have two children, which means my television time is further reduced. I have enough content to satisfy me. Others, however, may be able to take better advantage of those services.

What Changed?

It was a gradual change, but one I noticed along the way. First, I live in an area with one-hour delivery. I saw that as convenient, but again, more of a nice-to-have than a necessity. Then came the emergence of Alexa-enabled devices, which interests me – and I think this is going to be huge. Then came the big one: Amazon acquired Whole Foods (WF). I am a Whole Foods-first household. This acquisition intrigued me because I knew something would come of it.

I have also had an Amazon credit card for years. It is one I rarely ever use. However, as a non-Prime member, using this card at WF allows me to receive 3% cash-back at Amazon. Prime members receive 5% on the same purchases. This is something I had to take a serious pause to consider. The question I asked myself was whether the 2% difference would pay for Prime. After all, I am shopping at WF anyway. For one month, I tracked how much I received with 3% cash back and calculated how much the extra 2% would have been. Then, on two trips, I was given the in-store Prime member discounts while checking out. Amazon is sneaky like that. Based on my purchases, I saved roughly $3 per trip with the in-store discount alone. If I shopped two times per month (which I easily do), this would extrapolate to roughly $72 per year. Amazon was breaking down my walls.

Then came Prime Day 2018. It all changed. Not because I care about Prime Day itself, but because Amazon announced that if you shop at WF the week of Prime Day you would receive a $10 credit to spend on Prime Day. I bit the bullet and signed up for a free trial. GASP! Of course, I got the $10 credit. But to my surprise, so did my wife. Now I am at $92 saved. On Prime Day itself, I again saved $3 on member-only sales.

After Prime Day, I received an email from Amazon thanking me for everything and giving me another $10 credit toward an Amazon purchase through August. And of course, I ran out of batteries two days later. Guess what I did? Now I am up to $102. If you throw in the extra 2% I have spent during the first two weeks of my trial membership, I have surpassed the $119 price tag.

Is this enough to keep me renewing? Maybe. Maybe not. But I am excited to see what’s next. What I am most anxious about is same-day WF delivery to my area. I expect it sooner or later. Now you’re talking value that fits my lifestyle!

What Retailers Can Learn

At the end of the day, Amazon took a slow and steady approach. But they kept at it! Ultimately, they added value to my experience, with both cost and convenience. As a retailer, how do you compete with Amazon? It’s imperative you understand how your brand and products fit into your customers’ lives. Reinforce this value at every step along the customer journey, from email to your website to your social channels. Make it hard for people to say no to you rather than finding a reason to say yes.  

Consider email marketing, for example. When it comes to email, make sure your automated emails speak to what matters to them most. Do they care about price, convenience, quality of products, satisfaction guarantees, flexible return policies, a commitment to a cause, or a combination of these? Are your marketing emails relevant to consumers and help them along their journey?

Most importantly, be patient. Focus on improving one thing at a time. Improving 10% of 10 things will get you nowhere. Continue to make things better and see them through to completion. Optimizing the customer experience and providing value to your subscribers is what will ultimately win them over.

I am now a Prime member, but am I an Amazon loyalist? Certainly not. Amazon is hoping I am like other Prime members and will spend an extra $600 year more than non-Prime members. I am not confident that I will be that person, but I am 100% confident they will get more of my business than they had before.

Kudos, Amazon, you finally got me! But you have made me more paranoid than ever. I know that brunch, heat index, and wind chill are reading this and see this as their hope to win their own fight with me.

But those are topics for another day.  

Like reading my thoughts on Amazon? Here are a few other stories you might enjoy:

Amazon 4-star and What It Could Signal for Amazon’s Future Retail Business

Why Amazon is Trying to Out‑Walmart Walmart

Future of Ecommerce: How Amazon and Giant Retailers Will Change in 10 Years

Alexa, Order Me Browserless Commerce

The Commerce Marketer Podcast:

Episode 036: How to Get Amazon Reviews & Why Your First 50 Matter

Episode 034: Marketplace Bootcamp: Keys to Successful Selling

How Ecommerce and Email Marketing Tracked Through Gray November

Each year, I make my predictions for Gray November, a month-long season of discounts, and the rest of the holiday season — but this year I didn’t.

As Dr. Seuss might say, now, please don’t ask me why. I don’t quite know the reason. It could be that my predictions wouldn’t be quite right. But I think the most likely reason of all is that too many mobile emails were optimized two sizes too small.

Whatever the reason, the season, or the screen, let’s take a look at how online shoppers kicked off this holiday season. How did Gray November play out from a consumer spending standpoint? On which devices did consumers shop? Let’s take a look at a few key highlights:

Notable BFCM Spending

Online sales from Nov. 1-Dec. 6 were $80.3 billion according to Adobe Analytics, up 16% from 2017. For the second consecutive year, every single day in November drove over $1 billion in online sales; this is the new daily benchmark for the month. The upcoming benchmark will be $2 billion sales days; 14 of the first 36 days of the holiday season hit this new benchmark.

And for the big three:

• Thanksgiving Day: $3.7 billion in online sales, up 28%.

• Black Friday: $6.2 billion in online sales, up 24%

• Cyber Monday: $7.9 billion in online sales, up 17%

Looking at these individual days, we see larger YoY growth on Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day than Cyber Monday. Thanksgiving has been evolving into a major shopping day over the past several years, and retailers should expect this to continue.

This should come as no surprise, as sales were noticeably ramped up beginning the Monday of Thanksgiving week, following a trend seen the last several years.

Shopping by Devices

We have seen mobile continue to increase its share of web traffic and online sales over desktop. This year we saw a similar yet evolving story from consumers.

Traffic: Mobile once again ruled traffic to websites, taking 57% of it. Of this, 49% was from smartphones. While not apples to apples, if we compare this to the overall holiday season of last year, we begin to see a slight, if predictable, shift.

While the overall percentage is the same as last year’s season, smartphones took some share away from tablets. In 2017, smartphones accounted for 46% of web traffic while tablets accounted for 10%. As screens get larger and tablet usage slowly declines, we see a shift in consumers favoring smartphones as their go-to online search device.

Sales: From a sales standpoint, desktop still owns the day, accounting for 60% of online purchases. While still dominant, this is a decrease from the 67% we saw during the holidays overall last year. Smartphones accounted for 30% of sales, while tablets accounted for the remaining 10%. Bottom line: If you’re not mobile-optimized, you’re not optimized.

Notable Email Marketing Highlights

As I do every year, I track the volume of emails I receive to my personal inbox from the hundreds of retailers I subscribed to. I look at send volumes and advertised subject lines during the season, and here are a few interesting observations.

High-volume send times: High sends were prevalent throughout most of November, although the acceleration started Thanksgiving week, with an average lift of 30% as compared to the three weeks prior. Bronto, which sends hundreds of millions of emails each day, saw a 10% YoY lift in email sends on Black Friday and 21% lift in sends on Cyber Monday. Retailers continue to send, and they send a lot.

The four highest send days in my inbox, in order, were Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Thanksgiving Day and the Tuesday after Cyber Monday. For Bronto, it was Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Thanksgiving Day and the Sunday before Cyber Monday. On Cyber Monday alone, Bronto sent more than half a billion emails!

Subject lines: Starting with the last Friday before Thanksgiving, the term “Black Friday” was being used in at least 18% of all subject lines each day up to and including Black Friday.

Looking at incentives during Thanksgiving week, discounts were deep and widely available. Fifty percent discounts was the most advertised incentive throughout the week, followed by free shipping, 20% discounts and 30% discounts, respectively.

And what about my shopping habits?If you recall, last year I finished my shopping before the Black Friday clock struck midnight. This year, many sales early in the week mirrored the Black Friday offers from 2017. By Black Friday this year I had made all but two purchases. The final two came later that weekend.

All in all, starting in mid-November, I bought lots of toys, ribbons and tags. I bought lots of packages, presents and bags. What does this all mean? It means that me, myself, the ol’ marketer, successfully won Gray November with ease.

All indications are that this holiday season saw the biggest ecommerce sales yet; Adobe won’t release its final figures until NRF’s Big Show in January. If true, we are going to enter 2019 with higher ecommerce expectations than ever; it’s going to be an interesting year.

How did the holiday season look from your vantage point? I’d love to hear. Be sure to let me know.

Amazon 4-Star and What It Could Signal for Amazon’s Future Retail Business

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On a recent trip to New York, I took the lovely ten-minute stroll from my hotel to Amazon’s newly opened SoHo neighborhood retail store, Amazon 4-star. For those that are unfamiliar with the concept, the store showcases only products that are new, trending, or rated 4-stars or above on Amazon. With a simple Google search, you will find plenty written about the store and its layout. But during my visit, I couldn’t help but think there was a much grander plan being rolled out before my eyes.

Let me take a moment to call out some of my own observations and what they could be signaling for the future for Amazon’s brick-and-mortar retail business.

Small sections. The footprint of the store was small (but maybe not for NYC standards). That required the different “departments” to carry fewer products. There just wasn’t a wide selection of products from each category to choose from. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, and here’s why:

Having a limited, random assortment of products that never change won’t be enough to ensure repeat customer visits. After all, how many Instapots does one person need? Carrying fewer products will certainly require the store to rotate products, keeping the store fresh and maintaining consumer interest.

Pricing: Amazon, like many sites, utilizes dynamic pricing. Providing a seamless shopping experience both online and in-store with consistent pricing can be a challenge. Amazon’s answer is electronic shelf tags that can sync from online to in-store. Like many things Amazon does, this provides a more cohesive consumer experience. Amazon also promotes the benefits of being a Prime member by showcasing the Prime member pricing on the price tag.

Product bundling: In-store merchandising has improved over the years. There was a time when putting peanut butter and jelly next to each other on the shelf wasn’t commonplace. Like Amazon does on their site, they brought the product bundling experience to the store. You can see displays of “frequently bought together” products. They also have dedicated tables for products popular in New York City. This demonstrates their focus on using online purchasing data to integrate it into in-store merchandising.

Amazon products: And, of course, it wouldn’t be an Amazon store without drawing attention to some of some of its core products: Alexa-enabled devices, Fire TV, and Ring products were all prominently displayed. I felt like all of the other products in the store were a way to put some window dressing on the fact the store’s whole purpose is to drive adoption of these devices.

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Checkout Process: Unlike the cashier-less Amazon Go stores, Amazon 4-star’s checkout process is more traditional. While I did not purchase anything during my visit, I watched others checkout. To me it seemed a bit clunky. Some were clumsily messing with their phones while cashiers were trying to assist them. This seems far removed from the seamless checkout processes of one-click purchasing and cashier-less stores. I wonder if this will be improved as time goes on.

Overall, the store was inviting and could be useful for grabbing a USB cable, or maybe a new Ring doorbell. But how many of those things do I need? This can’t be all, can it? I mean, what’s the end game?

Maybe This Is Just the Beginning for Amazon

While this store has an interesting concept of bringing the familiarity of the online shopping experience in-store, something has me asking myself, “what’s the deal with this?” Am I to think that Amazon, which is so concerned with customer experience, obstacle-free checkout processes, and ease of fulfillment and delivery would open up a single, small footprint store with a limited, and presumably rotating, inventory?

To me, something doesn’t quite add up.

There are some things this store is noticeably missing, like clothing, which makes up more than half of Amazon’s 70+ private label offerings. And home goods, jewelry, and other private-label categories of products. I immediately start thinking of that interesting Amazon-Kohl’s partnership that no one seemed to make sense of.

I am on record as saying I believe Amazon is looking to move into more large-store formats. It’s worth mentioning that you could easily fit this entire store into a Kohl’s location and have room leftover for lots more products. Could this store concept simply be a test to combine online and in-store purchasing data to determine the best way to merchandise in a larger store format? Doing so would provide them an opportunity to expand their offerings, such as their clothing and other product categories.

While I don’t believe Kohl’s is an acquisition target, I see the Amazon 4-star concept as just another toe in the water of the large brick-and-mortar swimming pool.

How Customer-First Policies Can Attract and Retain Customers

Customer service is important – possibly more important than ever.

Consider this: I once spent $720 over seven different orders in an eight-month span – all without a single issue. Then the day came: A piece of clothing, after only one wear and wash, started to come undone. I called customer service but was informed it was outside of their 30-day return window. Sure, this made sense. After all, it was the holiday season and I purchased the item as a gift. Even after explaining that to them, it did not matter. Since it was out of their exchange window, there was nothing they could do.

Strike that.

Nothing they would do.

According to eMarketer, 79% of people are very likely to switch to another company if they have a bad customer service experience. I became one of them.

In today’s retail landscape, products are widely available, and prices are very often comparable amongst companies. In this environment, the challenge retailers face is how to entice a consumer to purchase from them — and not their competitor. This is precisely where customer service can be a difference maker.

Having friendly customer service representatives is a good start but consider the company policies they have to enforce. Are your customer service policies actually helpful to your customers?

Here are two examples of types of policies that can have a major impact on purchasing — especially during peak times like the holiday season.

Return Policies

Like in the example above, a 30-day window might sound good, but it is truly enough time from a customer’s perspective? Did they have enough time to wear and wash a product? Are they allowed to wash a product? Did they have enough time to test out its many features? Did they have enough time for it to stand up to normal wear and tear?

Consider the impact of expanding your return policy to 45 or 60 days, especially during the holiday season. Would you realistically see a vast increase in service requests outside of the original window? If so, it might point to other issues which may need to be resolved. However, you might be able to attract new customers because your policies are more convenient than your competitors.

Price Matching

You’ve likely experienced this situation. You complete an order and the next day you get an email advertising a 40% off sale. You subsequently become a bit perturbed and contact the company to ask for a credit for the difference. When the company obliges, you are satisfied. When they don’t, you become dissatisfied with the brand. Uh oh! Of course, a simple segment could have avoided this email snafu altogether, but let’s talk about what happens now.

Consider reevaluating your policies around situations such as these. Will you need to credit purchases made two weeks ago? Probably not. Should you consider crediting a customer who purchased less than 24 hours ago? Probably. No matter how you structure your policy, ask yourself whether your customer feels valued as a result.

Whether it is the cost and method of shipping and returns, hours and channels of customer service, or one of the policies I mentioned above, all have a major impact on purchases and customer retention. When crafting policies that are customer-first, be sure to promote these to your customers. Highlight them on your website, especially during the checkout process. Include them in your marketing emails, especially in lifecycle messages such as browse and cart abandonment. Constant reinforcement of your commitment to your customers should be paramount.

Seventy percent of people are willing to pay more for a product or service that has a good customer service reputation. Paying more means discounting less, which might also reduce the need to credit people’s orders for newly discounted items.

With my personal experience, I stopped doing business with a brand not because I wanted to, but because I lost confidence in them. To them, the fact I was an engaged customer did not matter. The fact I was a repeat customer did not matter. The only thing that seemingly did matter to them was taking my money. They refused to value me as a customer and paid the price for it.

Don’t underestimate your customers. There are a lot of things in business you can’t control. Customer service isn’t one of them. You have complete control. Making it a strength of your brand can not only amplify your brand’s reputation but also be a major component of attracting and retaining lifelong customers.

7 Ways to Prepare Your Email Marketing for the Holidays

Believe it or not, the holiday season is right around the corner. This year’s holiday season is projected to rake in $123 billion in online sales, a 15.3% growth over last year. Considering nearly 25% of Cyber Monday sales were driven by email marketing, it is imperative to have your holiday email marketing strategy well planned out. Before getting into ways to prepare your holiday email marketing strategy, let’s look at four trends from last year that I expect to continue.

4 Notable 2017 Trends That Will Continue:

1.  Thanksgiving Day generated $2.87 billion in online sales. This day keeps growing in importance for retailers. From my personal inbox, it was the fourth-highest email send day. Bronto reported it was their third-highest email send day. Expect this trend to continue this year.

2. Black Friday drove nearly $1.9 billion in mobile revenue. That made up nearly 37% of all of Black Friday’s online revenue. It is 2018. If you’re not mobile optimized, you’re not optimized.

3. Cyber Monday became the first day ever to reach $2 billion in mobile revenue, setting a new mobile record. Remember that thing I said about being mobile optimized?

4. Gray November, a month-long series of discounting, is a mainstay. In 2017, every day in November drove $1 billion in online sales for the first time. In total, 58 of 61 days of the holiday season crossed this figure. The holidays are not black or white. Like the clouds in the Northeast this time of year, they are very much gray.

With these trends expected to continue how, as retailers, should you prepare your email marketing for success in 2018? While I don’t have enough time to lay out all the potential ways, here are seven important steps to jumpstart your holiday season planning.

7 Ways to Prepare Your Email Marketing for the Holidays

1. Preach your differentiators

Not only will you have your regular customers shop with you, but you will also have seasonal or first-time buyers shopping. Remind or inform them why they should choose to shop with you and not elsewhere. Do you offer extended return policies, gift wrapping, price guarantees, satisfaction guarantees, or other value-adds? If so, shout them from the rooftops. This is especially critical if your brand does not discount.

2. Entice with email design

During the season, the majority of the emails will begin to look like one another. They tend to lack creative design that engages email subscribers. Design your emails to draw attention with the use of flow, color, creative designs, or anything else to break from generic email design. Just as important, design for mobile-first. Last year 46% of all holiday website traffic was from smartphones. This is the new norm.

3. Determine your promotional strategy

Plan which discounts to offer and when (think Gray November). With so many discount options to choose from, you can determine which will have the most benefit and best protect margins. Three trends from last year included retailers offering category-specific sales, free gifts with purchases, and in-store only discounts. These tactics help keep people opening emails throughout the season, allow retailers to sell add-on items with greater margins, and drive in-store traffic. These trends are all likely win-wins for retailers.

Just as importantly, have a promotional contingency plan and prepare backup promotions or variations in advance. Be sure to have the email creative completed and have the promo codes set in your ecommerce platform and email provider in advance. This will eliminate any last-minute scrambling on your email team.

4. Create exclusivity

I saw several retailers offering “exclusive” early access to deals as being a subscriber of the email program. Lulus even asked subscribers to confirm interest by submitting a simple form to gain access. Exclusive access not only reinforces the value of your email program but can also be publicly advertised in advance as a means of growing your email list.

5. Product recommendations

The trend of self-gifting has been rising over the past several years. In fact, it is reported that 25% of holiday purchases are a self-gift. While emails with gift guides and top gifts for the season make sense, they ignore the actual email recipient. In many cases, that person is also a customer. Using intuitive and personalized product recommendations inside of your emails and on your website is a great way to encourage self-gifting while promoting gift sales at the same time.

6. Optimize transactional messages

Be sure to optimize these highly-read messages with product recommendations, upsells, cross-sells, sister brand promotions, prominent customer service info, brand differentiators, and even email subscription callouts. These messages can not only reinforce the value of your brand but help drive sales. I once had a client who drove nearly 20% of their yearly email revenue directly from transactional messages.

7. Adapt life-cycle messaging.

Finally, look at your lifecycle messages and determine tweaks that should be made to account for holiday shoppers. For instance, as more people use their shopping carts as wish lists and do comparison shopping, how might that impact your cart abandonment strategy? Consider adding a fourth message, alter your discount structure, or decreasing time between messages. These can all be effective in recapturing sales.

For a welcome series, promoting top gifts for the season, or focusing the messaging on the season may prove to convert new email subscribers at a higher rate. Be sure to tout differentiators here! If you have a purchase anniversary email sending, consider turning it off for the holiday season. Last year I was greeted with one of these messages. The message we sent during their seasonal 50% off sale. The incentive in the email message was far less and was received on the same day two 50% emails from the brand came through. This message did not provide value.

While not a complete list, they provide some starting points to begin planning for holiday success. With an expected 15% growth for ecommerce sales this holiday season, the question becomes clear. How much of that 15% are you prepared to capture?

Are Your Competitive Differentiators Really Differentiating?

What are your competitive differentiators? When I was consulting, I would ask this question of my clients during our very first meeting. While it may seem like a simple question, answers were often hard to come by. Many times, what a retailer thought was their differentiator was the viewpoint of the employee—not necessarily that of the customer.

In today’s competitive retail environment, differentiation is more important than ever. Yet, as I surf from retailer website to retailer website and endlessly click on hundreds of marketing emails in my inbox, I am struck by one thing: Very few retailers are communicating to me what makes them different from the next guy. This got me thinking: Why is this the case, and what can retailers do to change this?

Who Communicates Differentiators?

Amazon has evolved from the online bookstore it once was by doing things differently to grow their business. They focused on being customer-centric. They provide(d) great customer service and free shipping, and now offer a litany of benefits associated with Prime. They are continuously adding perks that consumers want. And guess what? They want you to know. They promote it at every stage on the shopping experience.

If a non-Prime member navigates to the site they will see the “Try Prime” image in the upper left corner of the screen. When viewing a product, they will see a Prime callout under the pricing touting fast, free shipping. Above the “Add to Cart” button they again see a checkbox asking if the user wants “FREE Two-Day Shipping” by trying Prime. During checkout I am again presenting with the free shipping callout with a trial of Prime. They even offer Prime-Only products. Prime is their differentiator and they constantly reinforce the value of Prime to shoppers.

Looking at one of Amazon’s biggest competitors, Walmart, we know their differentiator is/was selection and low prices. Consumers recognize this but resting on these laurels in today’s age is not good enough. Walmart’s website constantly reinforces free 2-day shipping with no membership fees. As I move through the shopping cart I am again reminded of this. If you look at Walmart’s emails, every one of them has a banner above the main image advertising, “No membership fees with free 2-day shipping.” This is a direct counter to Amazon’s paid Prime service. While their primary differentiator has always been low prices, they know constant reinforcement is one way to attract or retain customers.

But those are both examples of very large companies. Let’s look at a different brand: TOMS. They differentiated through their One for One model, where with each purchase a product donation is made to those in need around the world. Other retailers have also taken to this model, as younger consumers demonstrate their desire to be socially conscious. Upon going to TOMS website, I see a plethora of callouts to this program, including in the navigation and as I scroll down the page. With every email from TOMS this program is again reinforced within their messaging. TOMS is constantly demonstrating to consumers what makes them stand out.

While your company may not be Amazon or Walmart, you likely compete with them. Now, include the smaller competitors into the mix and the market becomes very tight, very quickly. So, how do you differentiate your brand from your competitors and influence consumers to purchase from you?

How Do You Differentiate?

There are many ways to differentiate, including price, shipping speed, return policies, customer service, product quality, product selection, location, in-store experience, rewards programs, consumable content (e.g. how-to videos), technology (e.g. mobile apps), and social causes. Think about ways you can reinforce your brand differentiators at every step of customer engagement. Here are some things to consider:

Website: While this might seem obvious, does your site visibly do this? Visit yours and two of your competitor’s sites. Is there anything on the homepage of these sites that would tell a consumer what differentiates the brands from one another? Don’t let your most valuable asset sit idly by.

Email: Look at reinforcing these in every one of your messages but start with your welcome messaging. I just looked at the last 30 welcome emails I received and only three—I repeat three—of them included any mention of what makes them or their products different. These emails go to brand new email subscribers! This is a prime opportunity to influence a customer. If nothing else, it might make them pause before pulling the trigger with your competitor. Don’t waste this golden opportunity.

Beyond the welcome, look for areas in your promotional emails to reinforce what makes you different. This could be secondary banner callouts or added content to your headers. Cart and browse abandonment messages are often overlooked places to include your differentiators. Remember, these messages are sent to consumers who did not buy. Reinforcing what makes you stand out can overcome the obstacles to conversion.

And yes, personalization can be a differentiator. Always consider using intuitive product recommendations in both your emails and on your website.

Social Media: Be proactive, respond to and engage with your social followers. This is your opportunity to establish a personal connection with consumers. If a consumer knows your brand is receptive and available, it can build consumer confidence. Remember, by publicly communicating with one person, everyone else can also see that. While the immediate focus is on this one person, that exchange will transcend to others.

Customer Service: Customer service is a differentiator all by itself, and, I would argue, more important than ever. If you excel at customer service, shout it from the hilltops. This shows you are customer-centric and care about them. People like shopping with companies knowing they will be taken care of if something goes amiss. Remember that your customer service is an extension of your sales team. One bad experience can cost you a customer for life. Great experiences can keep them shopping for life. Be sure to train them well.

In a retail environment where the consumer has more shopping choices than ever, differentiation is arguably more critical than ever. You need to communicate this to consumers at every step of the customer lifecycle. But before doing so, you need to really think about why someone would purchase from you and not someone else. So, let me ask you: What are your competitive differentiators?

4 Ways to Produce More Authentic Brand Images

Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, email marketing, website images – we live in an image-rich online world. And now that everyone has a camera on hand 24/7, brands can no longer get by with boring, same-old-same-old photos. Thanks to a rise in social influencers and user-generated content (UGC), those old images are losing their effectiveness. Consumers expect more authenticity.

While retailers are beginning to re-evaluate how they use photography to engage customers, they can’t rely on customers to generate all of that authentic imagery for them. Here are four ways to find a good balance.

Include your customers

One reason retailers love UGC is it showcases customers telling their own stories. It is authentic. Unfortunately, most professional lifestyle photos are void of customers, so look for ways to change that. You might include customers browsing products in-store, engaging with a sales rep, purchasing or just using the product in a social way. You know, real people doing real things!

Focus on the story

Whether you’re selling a trendy pair of boots or dental implants, think of the story you’re trying to tell with your imagery and find ways to reinforce it. You might overlay a customer quote on a specific image to better bring that story to life. You could use an image of an end result and ask your audience to caption it. Only when an image has meaning beyond a smiling face will it tell a story.

Set the mood

Images are meant to enhance or showcase emotion. Consider the mood of the images you’re using. While the natural tendency is for every picture to showcase a smile, there may be times where you want to convey a different mood. It could be sassy, defeated, frustration or even shock, to name a few. Capture images of varying moods through change in facial expressions, background and lighting, and use them when communicating your story. That way, if a social media specialist or email marketer needs an image of someone in shock to promote something new and exciting, you’ll have images to compliment the story.

Think of the end game

Is the goal of the image of someone sitting on a futon to drive an immediate sale, seek out more information on a product, digest a piece of content, grow your social following or create community engagement? By thinking through the end goal of the image, your photo shoots can become more strategic. Creating conversation around the gorgeous throw pillow on the futon may generate better sales results than focusing on the futon itself, while focusing on the futon may generate more social conversation. Create imagery that relates to the moment and the goal you’re seeking.

As I discussed in a recent episode of The Commerce Marketer Podcast, finding your brand’s voice and telling a story through authentic images has never been more critical for retailers. The goal is to take and use your photographs in a more strategic and engaging manner. Remember: Just because the photo isn’t a selfie doesn’t mean it can’t still be authentic.