How to Use Free Shipping to Boost the Power of Your Holiday Emails

People love free stuff, and that includes free shipping. Shouldn’t you use this powerful incentive to pump up the performance of your holiday emails?

According to Deloitte’s 2018 retail holiday survey, the three most appealing incentives to shoppers last holiday season were price discounts (95%), free shipping (75%) and free gifts (52%). That same report also showed that free shipping is the second-most common reason why consumers turn to ecommerce, with convenience being the first.

This appetite for free shipping has made it a powerful promotional tactic during the holiday season, and last holiday season it became a major focal point in many email promotions.

But free shipping is more than just casually appealing to consumers — it can be the difference between a sale and a lost customer. Twenty-two percent of holiday shoppers flat-out refuse to pay for shipping during the holiday season.

And last year, it showed. Each week during the holiday season saw a year-over-year increase in orders that were shipped free, with some weeks reaching as high as 85%. Even the week before Christmas, a time when standard free shipping is no longer available, more than two thirds of orders were still being shipped free.

Free Shipping Emerging in Holiday Emails

The term “free shipping” was spotted in the subject lines of many holiday emails throughout the season. Looking at my own inbox, with hundreds of daily emails, it was one of the top three advertised discounts almost every day, from mid-November through the end of the month. On Cyber Monday, the largest online shopping day in history, it was the second-most common discount advertised in subject lines.

Not only was the term used in the subject line, it was often a focal point of a holiday email, either the front end of the subject line or the primary incentive. To no surprise, this focus carried over to the email body, where the incentive was often more prominent than discounts.

Pitney Bowes reports that 79% of consumers view free shipping as more important than fast shipping. Early in the season, when shoppers have time to wait for deliveries, offering free shipping can serve as a great add-on shopper enticement. But as Christmas approaches, free shipping can turn from an add-on to the primary incentive.

Late in the season, procrastinators have fewer fulfillment choices. Many retailers used free shipping (including expedited), not discounts, as the primary incentive and were able to attach a minimum spend on the order. Late-season shoppers need fast shipping, but also value the cost.

When preparing your holiday email promotions, you’ll want to make free shipping a staple of your strategy. Here are a few ways to incorporate it into your holiday email marketing strategy:

7 Free Shipping Ideas for The Holiday Season

• Reduce or remove the qualifying minimum spend thresholds during the holidays. It’s a gift-giving season, and the majority of people self-gifting may spend past that threshold anyway.

• Include banners or other prominent email call-outs to promote your free shipping offer. If you remove or lower the qualifying spend threshold for the holidays, be sure to promote this as well.

• Using free shipping as THE incentive. This will be especially useful during seasonal lulls, and also as the season winds to a close and procrastinators are looking for value.

• If you can’t remove minimums for the entire season, use free shipping in flash sale promotions. This allows you to give consumers what they want but attach a sense of urgency to complete the purchase. A side benefit of time-sensitive flash sales is that they can keep people opening your emails throughout the season.

• Offer select free shipping promotions for email subscribers only. You can promote email-only holiday incentives on other channels, such as social media, prior to the season, helping you grow your email list.

• Test the placement of the term “free shipping” in the subject line of your holiday emails. Use them to front-end a subject line, with capital letters to make it stand out, and make the subject line only about free shipping.

• Don’t ignore the preheader text. If you have a lot to convey in your subject line, use the preheader to call attention to free shipping.

Set Your Emails Free

Free shipping will be hot this holiday season! Consumers expect it and retailers will promote it. Since holiday discounts run for nearly two full months, using free shipping as an add-on or stand-alone promotion will provide your program with another to keep your promotions fresh in customers’ eyes.

Use their expectations to your advantage. If you choose not to, that’s fine, too. After all, the best part about all of this advice is that – you guessed it – it’s free!

3 Holiday Promotions That Keep Subscribers Opening Your Emails

There’s no shortage of promotions retailers can choose when planning their holiday email marketing strategy. However, the holiday season is long, so retailers need to find ways to not only increase sales but also keep subscribers opening their emails.

Here are three kinds of promotions that I expect will be heavily used by retailers throughout this upcoming holiday season to accomplish these goals.

1. Category and Daily Deals

Category-specific sales, promotions where one category of products is discounted, have been an increasingly popular holiday promotion over the past several years. With Black Friday sales now lasting the entire week for many retailers, category-specific sales are a way to keep the discounts new and exciting, which keeps consumers checking their emails.

If you do plan to offer daily deals, there’s no need to leave them a mystery. Consider letting people know early on which categories will be on sale and when. This approach allows the consumer to better plan their purchases.

Sure, they may want to wait two days to purchase sweaters at an additional discount, but many will want to consolidate purchases, especially if there’s a free shipping threshold they need to reach. Use a sense of urgency in your marketing by reminding people that items may sell out quickly to encourage order consolidation.

Offering daily category sales can also help you plan additional ad campaigns and year-end promotions later in the holidays. By knowing that one category of products didn’t sell as expected, you can begin to offer deeper discounts on these products throughout the season or feature them in year-end closeout promotions.

2. Free Shipping

Free shipping has quickly become a consumer expectation. According to Deloitte, it was the second-most appealing discount to shoppers last holiday season, behind only price discounts.

This likely explains why, according to eMarketer, there was a year-over-year increase in holiday orders that were shipped free, starting with Black Friday week and continuing through Christmas Day.

Last season, there was a noticeable increase in retailers’ advertising free shipping as a primary incentive. Consumers will once again be drawn to free shipping, and you’ll want to be ready to take full advantage of it.

As the season begins to wind down and expedited shipping becomes necessary, consider offering free or upgraded shipping as the primary incentive, not as an add-on to another promotion. You may want to lower or remove the spend threshold to qualify for these offers, as many retailers did last season.

In a lot of cases, you may find consumers spend above the previous threshold as they round out their gift buying. Just be sure to promote free shipping in both the subject line and email body copy.

3. Buy Online Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS) is for everyone

Whether you’re an omnichannel retailer or not, BOPIS affects you. Forty-one percent of consumers used this service last holiday season, and 50% of consumers decided where to shop based on whether BOPIS was a fulfillment option.

If you are an online-only retailer, you need to account for your competition who offer it — and maybe even alter your free shipping strategy to account for it. If you’re a retailer who offers it, you’ll want to use this to your advantage.

According to the NRF, the No. 1 reason consumers chose BOPIS was to avoid paying for shipping. If you’re an omnichannel retailer, promote BOPIS as a stand-alone incentive, potentially offering a discount, gift card or free gift for BOPIS orders.

As the season winds down, focus on those holiday procrastinators by encouraging a sense of urgency and pitting free in-store pickup against costly next-day shipping offered elsewhere.

Source: National Retail Federation, “2018/2019 Winter Consumer View,” Jan, 2019

But this value-add does not have to be saved until the end of the season. Consider giving the service a little customer-friendly pizzazz, such as by offering free gift-wrapping on these orders or in-store coupons at time of pick-up to encourage unplanned purchases, or even by providing complimentary hot chocolate, coffee, tea, and holiday cookies.

If you offer BOPIS, be sure to promote it wherever you can:

• In a dedicated section of your emails

• Embedded into your primary email creative

• Even in lifecycle messages, such as in a welcome series.

And, of course, clearly provide a link to a store locator in your emails, such as in the header or navigation bar.

Wrapping It Up

The holiday season is long, but by planning promotions that can last the whole season and provide competitive differentiation, you can keep subscribers opening your emails and be ready to earn as much of the shoppers’ wallet as possible.

Top Holiday Email Marketing Planning Resources

Email marketers are always looking for holiday-related content, and I provide a few pieces this time of year. Between sifting through and analyzing tens of thousands of holiday emails in my personal inbox, charting daily emails received, identifying recurring themes, looking through the previous years' online sales data, reading industry analysis, interviewing podcast guests, and talking to industry peers, I am left connecting dots with what retailers and email marketers will be promoting this holiday season.

As a former email marketing consultant, I know email marketers are always looking for as many actionable holiday resources as they can get. So here you are — a collection of my holiday resources (so far — there's more to come), including articles, podcasts, and webinars, all in one place. I will continue to update this as items become publicly available. I hope you find these to be useful!

2019 Holiday PLANNING RESOURCES:

Cyber 10: The Holiday Shopping Sprint You REALLY Need to Prepare For (article, GrowWire)

3 Holiday Promotions That Keep Subscribers Opening Your Emails (article)

Five Often-Overlooked Holiday Email Marketing Tips (article)

How to Use Free Shipping to Boost the Power of Your Holiday Emails (article, Multichannel Merchant)

Holiday Email Lookbook - 2019 Edition (download)

The Most Important Things to Know About Holiday Email Planning (article, Multichannel Merchant)

Ready, Set, Sell: 7 Tweaks Retailers Can Make Now to Maximize Holiday Profitability (article, Brainyard)

2019 Consumer Insights: 6 Trends Dominating This Year’s Holiday Shopping Season (Whitepaper, Shopkick)

Holiday Webinars:

Holiday Email Marketing Trends, Tips, and Tactics for 2019 (Bronto Marketing Platform)

Call-To-Action! Top 2019 Holiday Email Marketing Trends and Tactics (RetailWire)

Holiday Email Marketing 2019: Trends, Tips and Tactics (Retail Dive)

Holiday Podcast:

The Commerce Marketer Podcast: Ep. 061: Preparing Email Marketing for the Holidays

Listen on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts

2019 HOLIDAY RECAP:

2019 Holiday Season Takeaways and Ecommerce Marketing Action Items

BACK TO BLOG HOME

Five Often-Overlooked Holiday Email Marketing Tips

As the holidays approach, email marketing teams are busy determining promotional schedules, designing messages, and inputting coupon codes into their e-commerce platforms, among a slew of other items. With all of this work happening behind the scenes, there are a few holiday items that all too commonly fall by the wayside. When preparing your email marketing program for the season, don’t overlook some of the items that can help you deliver a better customer experience and generate more sales. Here are five items not to overlook this holiday season.

1. Optimize transactional messages

Messages like order and shipping confirmation messages are some of the most read email messages. At a minimum, be sure these messages are branded, aesthetically appealing, and have clear and obvious customer service information. To make these messages do more for you, include other elements, such as product recommendations, suggested upsells or cross-sells, sister brand promotions, a customer-only promotion, and a callout to subscribe to your email marketing program. Remember, all customers receive these messages, not just email subscribers.

2. Audit lifecycle messages

Consider your current lifecycle messages, their automation rules, and how they impact the customer experience during the holidays. For instance, let’s say your welcome series spans four days and withholds new subscribers from receiving promotional emails. Do you really want to withhold new subscribers from marketing emails on Black Friday or Cyber Monday?

You may want to make adjustments to the series, which could include:

• Sending only the welcome message and suspending the series.

• Create a new welcome series that reinforces holiday content, such as gift guides, hot products of the season, extended return policies, BOPIS services, or other value-adds.

• Continue to send the welcome series, but allow subscribers to receive promotional messages.

This is just one example. Look at your other automated messages. Do you have a purchase anniversary message sent each year on Black Friday, offering a worse incentive than your Black Friday promotion? I receive one of these each year, and it provides no value to me as a subscriber. Do you need to adjust the timing, number of, or discounts with your abandoned cart messages? Remember, automated messages should never be considered “set it and forget it.”

3. Audit forms

You are going to receive increased traffic during the holidays, so be sure to audit each of your forms to ensure they work properly. These include embedded email subscription forms, pop-up signups, manage preference pages, and unsubscribe forms.

To audit the forms, go through the process of accessing the form like a web visitor, email subscriber or customer would. Do they display (and not display) as they should, do they close properly, are the landing pages correct, and do the desired actions (e.g., list assignment) function appropriately? You want to ensure the forms are not only functioning properly, but they are also assigning contacts to the correct lists.

When you are auditing your forms, don’t forget to test on mobile devices. Last year, for the first time, more than half of all retailer web traffic during the holidays was from smartphones. Ensure you test the forms not only on a laptop but also on smartphones.

Be sure to document where each of these forms lives on the backend, which employees have access to them, and how customers access the forms. This will give you the ability to quickly identify and resolve any issues that might arise during the season.

4. Preach your differentiators

During the holiday season, why should someone choose to shop with you and not someone else, especially seeing as many retailers are matching deep discounts with one another? You need to give consumers a reason to choose you by preaching your competitive differentiators. Some of these customer-first differentiators include free shipping, free returns, extended return policies, price matching, satisfaction guarantees, and buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS).

Prominently advertise these value-adds with banners or dedicated sections of your email, on your websit,e and your social pages. And when it comes to email, prominently showcase these in high-consideration messages, such as welcome, abandoned cart, and browse recovery messaging.

By focusing on what the customer wants and how you, as a brand, can deliver that can mean the difference between securing a holiday sale or losing it to your competitor.

5. Plan for the unexpected

Things rarely go as planned, and good email marketers prepare for those times. When it comes to the holiday season, there are a few specific ways to prepare for those “what if” moments, whether that be a slow website, lagging sales, or errant promo code.

• Prepare back-up promotions: Projections are just that, projections. If you find your sales through the season are lagging, sending another promotion can help jump-start those orders coming in. Create emails that utilize alternate incentives (such as tiered discounts, or free shipping with no minimums) or tried-and-true discounts that you know will resonate with your customers. By preparing these promotions in advance, you will prevent those last-minute scrambles and rush errors from your creative team.

• Promo codes: Set any promo code you plan on using in your e-commerce platform before you need it. While you may not need to use some of the alternate or extra promotional codes, it provides the ability to easily deploy email campaigns as needed.

• “Oops” message: Websites and e-commerce platforms have become more reliable, but there is still one of those “oops” moments each year. Some of these include a slow or crashed website, a wrong promo code, and order processing errors. Creating an anticipatory email ahead of those moments will allow you to send a correction email as soon as possible. When errors like this occur, every second can cost you a sale.

Planning for the holidays means more than just creating a few emails and sending them off to your subscribers. It is ensuring all aspects of your program is optimized, and you are prepared for every scenario. Making sure every “I” is dotted, and every “t” is crossed means you are doing everything you can to maximize your holiday sales.

The Most Important Things to Know About Holiday Email Planning

The holiday shopping season is upon us and, like last year, this year is expected to once again break online sales records — reaching $142 billion, according to eMarketer. For companies big and small, email marketing is going to have a significant hand in helping drive those record sales.

But planning for a long holiday season takes consideration and time. Regardless of whether you’ve already started the planning process or not, here are some of the key things you need to prepare your email marketing program for a successful holiday season.

Gray November, Cyber Monday, and the Cyber Ten

Gray November is no longer a trend — it’s the norm. But this year it becomes a bit longer. There are fewer days, only 27, between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. Plan for a long month leading up to Black Friday Week.

The Cyber Ten

Last year, 19% of online holiday revenue was generated from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, often referred to as the Cyber Five. Not surprisingly, these five days were the top five online sales days of the entire holiday season.

Twenty-three percent of Cyber Five sales came from email marketing. Looking at my inbox, the Sunday before Black Friday received the lowest number of emails for not only the entire week but for the following nine days. There is an opportunity to jump on early sales by increasing your email sends on this day.

But this year you should look beyond these five days and focus on a longer period. The ten-day period from November 24th to December 3rd will be an extremely busy shopping period. Let me introduce you to the Cyber Ten!

Here’s why:

• The day after Cyber Monday was the sixth busiest shopping day of the year, generating nearly $3 billion in online sales. This was only a slight difference from the fifth-busiest day.

• The day before Thanksgiving saw year-over-year growth of 32% and generated $1 billion in incremental sales. Expect this to be a major online sales day this year.

• Black Friday has finally morphed into Black Friday week, with many sales kicking off on the Monday before.

• The Sunday before Black Friday also saw an increase of $1 billion in incremental sales, meaning people were not only excited about the early deals but they shopped them.

Cyber Monday

Each year, Cyber Monday sets the record as the largest online sales day in history (nearly $8 billion in 2018). This year will be no exception. Your Cyber Monday email strategy should be to plan early and plan late.

• Last year more than half-a-billion was spent online by 7 a.m. PST.

• The most active shopping period of the entire year was from 7–11 p.m., ringing up $2 billion in online sales during that time.

• Last year, the Bronto Marketing Platform saw a 21% lift in year-over-year Cyber Monday emails sent, totaling more than a half-billion emails in one day. Plan on sending multiple emails!

• Many email marketers tend to relax a bit the day after — don’t. Remember, the day after is one of the biggest online sales days of the season.

Hot Promotions Of The Season

Throughout the holiday season, most retailers will run a multitude of discounts. According to Deloitte, the three most appealing discounts to shoppers last holiday season were price discounts, free shipping, and free gifts — and these were certainly noticeable last year.

Here are a few messaging strategies that were prominent last year, and that I expect to see this season too.

Daily deals

With holiday deals starting early, daily deals have always been a way to keep subscribers checking their emails. By offering special discounts on specific products or categories of products, subscribers may check their email more often to ensure they’re not missing anything.

One trend from last year was promoting categories that would be on sale throughout the entire campaign. For many of those that offered a week’s worth of daily deals (often coinciding with Black Friday week), they promoted at the onset which categories would be going on sale, and when. This way, subscribers who were planning on making a specific purchase could plan accordingly.

Free shipping

Free shipping became a major focal point in promotions last season. As mentioned, consumers found free shipping to be the second-most appealing promotional offer. This is likely why, according to eMarketer, there was a year-over-year increase of holiday orders that were shipped free, starting with Black Friday Week and continuing through Christmas Day.

As the season inched toward a close, free shipping — including expedited shipping — turned from an additional incentive to a primary one. While many retailers stipulated a minimum spend for the order, not all did. With free shipping, you have options to test.

Use free shipping as both an add-on incentive and a stand-alone one. Seeing as holiday discounts run for nearly two full months, using free shipping as a promotional tool may provide your program with another way to prevent your promotions from going stale.

Buy-online pickup in-store (BOPIS)

Forty-one percent of consumers reported using BOPIS last holiday season, and its year-over-year usage increased by 47% from November 1st through December 19th. According to the NRF, 64% of consumers choose BOPIS to avoid paying for shipping fees, which echoes consumers’ desire for free shipping promotions.

If you have the capability, promote your BOPIS service in your emails, on your website and in any other marketing channel you use — especially as the season winds down.

Last year, I saw retailers offering discounts for online and BOPIS-only orders to secure an immediate sale while still driving customers in-store, where 85% of shoppers said they made an unplanned purchase while picking up BOPIS orders.

Five Holiday Subject Line Strategies You Should Use

Knowing the inbox will be crowded throughout the holiday season, retailers must catch their subscribers’ attention. Emojis, even after all of these years, continue to be a good way to gain inbox attention. Here are a few ways to effectively use emojis in your email messages.

1. Use one single emoji to start the subject line. This can catch readers’ attention without being overwhelming or distracting.

2. Use repeating emojis to make the email pop. Don’t worry, this won’t cause deliverability problems.

3. Use emojis to bookend subject line text. In the same vein, using, increasing and decreasing sized emojis as you move toward and away from the text can make the text stand out even more – even if the emoji lacks color.

4. Include repeating emojis in the preheader text. This not only stands out in the inbox pane but also allows you to use more text in the subject line.

5. Use an emoji in the “send from” name. This is used far less often but adding color to the sender name can make your email stand out.

Three Other Notable Holiday Marketing Tips

• Ensure your emails and website are mobile-friendly. Mobile generated nearly 40% of online revenue last season and accounted for more than half of all retailer web traffic for the first time. It also accounted for more than $2 billion on Cyber Monday alone.

• The new benchmark is $2 billion. Last season, only four days (12/22-12/25) failed to reach the $1 billion daily benchmark but none missed by more than $120 million. It seems that $2 billion is becoming the new benchmark, with 26 days reaching that mark in 2018 – that’s nearly double from the year prior.

• Send on the weekends. According to my own inbox analysis, most Saturdays and Sundays in November recorded the lowest volume of email sends for the entire month. Even with lower send volumes, every day in November still recorded online sales of $1 billion. Bump up your email sends on these days to take advantage of a less crowded inbox.

There you have it, some Rudolph-approved holiday tidbits to help guide your email marketing program this holiday season — you didn’t think I’d forget the obligatory holiday cliché, did you?

Cyber 10: The Holiday Shopping Sprint You REALLY Need to Prepare For

The holiday season is upon us, and, once again, it’s expected to set online sales records to the tune of $142 billion, according to eMarketer estimates. As online sales rapidly increase year-over-year, trends evolve and retailers adapt.

Take Gray November, for example. Over the past couple of years, we have seen those signature stand-alone online shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday morph into a month-long series of discounts leading up to those days.

And now, within Gray November comes another consumer shopping evolution that will become a holiday season norm — the Cyber 10.

In this article, I discuss why marketers need to look beyond the Cyber Ten and pay attention to the Cyber Ten. Topics include:

• Which days make up the Cyber Ten

• Why the Cyber Ten is no longer a trend, but an annual occurrence

• Which days in the Cyber Ten are seeing the biggest year-over-year growth

• Why Cyber Monday, even with all of the changes, remains king

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING

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.

View fullsize

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.

View fullsize

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.    

View fullsize

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

View fullsize

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