E-mail

Forrester Research Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru was on hand at the Retail Email Exchange symposium in San Diego last month to offer best practices for four current trends in the e-commerce space. Looking to debunk conventional wisdom, Mulpuru advised that things often turn out to be different than they initially appear. With that in mind, here are the four trends that Mulpuru addressed:

DEMCO realized it needed to find new ways to increase overall conversions on its website. The company selected an email service provider to create more sophisticated, automated email campaigns with shopping cart recovery initiatives and new subscriber welcome programs.

The summer months — and July in particular — are slow months for email marketing. Last year, July had the slowest year-over-year volume growth of all the months. Email marketers should take advantage of the slow summer months by taking some vacation and by starting to plan your holiday email marketing campaigns.

With Father’s Day messaging wrapped up, Fourth of July messaging will be on the rise. Last week we got our first reference to back-to-school shopping, which will build slowly and peak in August.

How tightly do you plan the upcoming schedule for your email campaigns? Marketers who view email as an important sales and acquisition channel are likely to have a detailed plan for what their email content will include in the next 90 days. They also have a skeleton outline for email offers over the following 90 days. Yes, successful email marketers are actively planning the next six months of activity.

Crocs was putting more and more emphasis and attention on its corporate Facebook page than it had in the past, which led to an increasing number of fans "liking" the brand each day. Crocs sought to take advantage of this growth by turning these "likers" into more than just your average fans.

Think it’s too late to launch an online campaign to drive sales this Memorial Day weekend? Think again! With Memorial Day less than two weeks away, now is the time to really hunker down and make sure your campaigns are ready for the first long weekend of the summer!

The top online retailers sent each of their subscribers 3.0 promotional emails on average during the week ending May 13. That’s down 10 percent week-over-week and 8 percent from where it was four weeks ago, but up 10 percent year-over-year.

Email is absolutely not dead! However, commoditized messaging is out. Consumers value and want to be communicated via relevant, intelligent and innovative emails. 

Earth Day and Mother’s Day messaging has peaked. Because of competition from a late Easter, Mother’s Day messaging is down 33 percent compared to 2009. Mother’s Day messaging should rebound in the next two weeks, however, appearing in more than 30 percent of retail emails.