E-mail

Retail Online Integration has put together this thorough, free whitepaper for you titled 10 Ways to Prepare Your Web Site for the Holidays. You'll find 10 clear and concise tips, that will make sure your Web Site is ready for the holidays and help drive sales to the max! Plus, 3 BONUS tips to make your email campaigns holiday-ready.

As interactive channels continue to grab a larger share of the marketing pie, retailers are presented with an ideal opportunity to look at new techniques to better use email and other online methods as acquisition channels for their businesses.

PROBLEM: Onlineshoes.com, an online retailer of women's, men's and kids' shoes and apparel, wanted to capture lost sales from consumers who either abandoned items in a shopping cart or browsed the site without making a purchase.

One of the fastest ways to get email recipients to open and click on messages is to send notices of abandoned carts. As Sara Ezrin, senior director of strategic services at Cheetahmail, explained to eMarketer, recipients of such messages are already thinking about the items in their cart, and that they are in the market for those products will spur them toward quick response.

In a session at last month's Digital Marketing Days Conference & Expo in New York City, Chris Marriott, vice president of global agency services at interactive marketing services firm Acxiom, and Josh Glantz, vice president and general manager at Publishers Clearing House (PCH) Online, the internet destination of the sweepstakes marketer, detailed how an integrated marketing approach can still win over consumers’ attention — and wallets.

The Global E-mail Attitudes Survey of 13,000 consumers in 13 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific reveals that email’s influence over multichannel purchasing is powerful, with the majority of consumers (58 percent) having been driven to make a purchase in a store or over the phone by a marketing email. And while websites are the preferred place for consumers to opt-in, they are also very willing to subscribe to email messages offline, for example, when placing a catalog order (46 percent), at the point of sale (29 percent) or via SMS text message (13 percent).

Almost 60 percent of online retailers don't send emails or do any type of follow-up marketing to shoppers who abandon carts, according to a recent survey. Abandoned cart emails are the most basic and lucrative of a class of emails called "triggered email." Merchants who ignore triggered email are missing out on some easy money — perhaps they had too much money to begin with?

After your from line, the most compelling thing motivating recipients to open your email is its subject line. You know the drill: To stand out in a cluttered inbox, you have to work hard to capture attention. Subject lines must be carefully crafted to develop innovative ways to present your latest promotions and products.

Q: "What's your opinion on using an affirmative opt-in email strategy versus an assumed opt-in strategy, when the subscriber groups include existing customers only (no prospects, leads, etc.) and email addresses have been pulled from a CRM system? These subscribers have not necessarily signed up to receive email on a website or through any other method."

Promotions are an important part of every marketer's email strategy - sales, discounts, discounts with purchases, gifts with purchases, free shipping, etc. These workhorse communications shouldn't be overlooked. They work well to motivate buyers to take actions, but they're not showstoppers. They won't make you stand out from the pack.