Even in a recession, Mother's Day holds a special place in our holiday calendars. According to National Retail Federation's 2012 consumer spending survey conducted by BIGinsight, the average person celebrating Mother's Day is expected to spend $152.52 on gifts, up... More

Even in a recession, Mother's Day holds a special place in our holiday calendars. According to National Retail Federation's 2012 consumer spending survey conducted by BIGinsight, the average person celebrating Mother's Day is expected to spend $152.52 on gifts, up from $140.73 last year. As overall spending increases, marketers have a unique opportunity to capitalize on this year's Mother's Day trends to drive sales.

What trends are emerging for Mother's Day 2012?

The online shopper presents an ever-expanding area of opportunity for marketers. According to NRF's survey over a quarter of all shoppers will buy Mother's Day gifts online this year, up from 21.5 percent in 2011.

Mobile is decisively on the rise, as 39.3 percent of Smartphone owners and 51.2 percent of tablet owners plan to use their devices to research products, compare prices, redeem coupons, look up retailer information and purchase Mother's Day gifts.

How are these trends relevant to your brand?

Mother's Day presents a great opportunity to sneak a peek into trends for the 2012 holiday season, as it falls right between shopping-heavy periods ranging from back-to-school, Black Friday & Cyber Monday, the winter shopping season and Valentine's Day. As consumers are increasing their spend and embracing online shopping on a variety of devices, marketers need to adapt and ensure that:

• Key competitors' digital campaigns for Mother's Day are closely monitored across multiple channels. Based on this competitive intelligence your digital marketing strategy should be continuously updated to counter competitive offers, adjust creative direction, and engage tech-savvy and increasingly brand-agnostic shoppers who are interested in both quality and savings. Having this type of competitive frame of reference will not only enable you to develop relevant insights from each campaign your competition deploys and optimize your own multi-channel marketing efforts, but it will also assist you in mapping out proactive strategy that helps boost sales in real time.
  
  
• Email marketing, landing pages and websites are perfectly scalable to any mobile device so customers are able to locate all pertinent information quickly and easily whenever and wherever they prefer.
  
  
• Email subject lines and content are optimized to grab and hold customer's attention, since email marketing is increasingly a key driver of purchase for online shopping.
  
  
• The brand is consistent across multiple digital touch-points ranging from email, Facebook and Twitter to landing pages and website. Since online shoppers are ever more present and engaged with brands across multiple channels, it's important to be loud and clear about the value your brand is providing. 
  
  
• Digital campaign efforts are properly measured in order to assess ROI. Even though this has been traditionally challenging for marketers, Yesmail Interactive discovered a strong correlation between email marketing and social engagement. According to this finding, customer engagement in social channels grows when email campaigns are deployed in the same timeframe. 

These four points in combination will enable you to take a multi-channel marketing approach that is informed by competitive intelligence, optimized in accordance with industry trends, measurable across multiple digital channels and designed to outperform your competition.

How can you implement these insights today?

A recent article by Internet Retailer suggests that 8% of Mother's Day shoppers will buy gifts within 48 hours of the holiday. This gives marketers ample opportunity to apply the insights outlined above and quickly develop a multi-channel marketing effort that communicates truly competitive offers, engages their database and translates into higher sales. Follow 1800Flowers' example and do it yourself.

Subject Line: Time Is Running Out. Make Mom Smile with Over 50 Blooms of Lilies, just $29.99! (social share buttons included - sent 5/9)

1. Identify top competitors, view popular campaigns, assess their special Mother's Day offers and develop an informed multi-channel strategy
2. Send a mobile scalable email with an inviting design, attention-grabbing subject line, easy to read copy, and a prominently featured Mother's Day deal that beats competitive offers
3. Ensure the email is easily shareable with the recipient's networks through prominently displayed social share buttons
4. Follow up with a Facebook campaign that reiterates the great offer previously communicated in the email and provide an extra incentive to turn the campaign view into a conversion (in this instance, 1800Flowers offers a free Mother's Day eCard)
5. Finish with a final reminder over Twitter that works two-fold: on one hand, it prompts engagement by providing great value (like a complimentary Mother's Day eCard) while subtly promoting a featured offer once the customer has clicked on the advertised link.
   

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Is there a "best day and best time" to send email marketing campaigns?  Every email marketer should be asking this question to optimize their email marketing program as it can make a significant impact. Yesmail Interactive tracks email marketing trends,... More

Is there a "best day and best time" to send email marketing campaigns?  Every email marketer should be asking this question to optimize their email marketing program as it can make a significant impact. Yesmail Interactive tracks email marketing trends, best practices and we provide our clients insights and test plans to help determine the best day/time for their email marketing campaigns. There is certainly not a 'one size fits all' answer;  the best day and time to deploy an email campaign will vary greatly based on client, the client's target audience, industry, seasonality, campaign, customer's buying cycle, etc.  With that in mind we recommend the following approach to find out which day/time is best for your program:

1. Develop an email program tailored to your strategic objectives and your customers' individual purchase cycle
2. Conduct a competitive analysis to determine when your competitors are launching their campaigns (Yesmail Marketing Intelligence Tool is a great tool to use!)
3. Build a test plan and test! Start with day of week and then zero in on time of day. Key conversion metrics to look at are revenue, conversion rate, open and click.

In our recent 'Digital Channel Analysis: a 2011 Holiday Season Recap' webinar, we leveraged our Yesmail Market Intelligence tool to determine which day of the week and time of day were most popular for top retailers during the holiday season. 
While all days were very active (on average 3.5 emails were deployed per week), Mondays and Fridays racked up the most email deployments. The time of deployment varied greatly. Keep in mind that with our Yesmail Market Intelligence tool you can zero in on the exact days and time that your competitors deploy their campaigns. This is great competitive intelligence, as it gives you reasonable grounds for email strategy adjustment or a benchmark for building out a new email marketing program.

In order to arrive at the best day and time to deploy your campaigns, testing is an absolute necessity.  We have discovered that while there are some trends within industries, there is not a universal rule for best day or time for deployment across verticals.  That is why you should consistently test over set periods of time, with statistically relevant samples.  Over years of frequent testing we have developed a mixed bag of findings for "best days":

• Tuesday-Thursday (no difference):  For a Loyalty client.
• Saturday:  For a specialty retail client.
• Sunday:  For a nationwide large retail client.
• Monday:  For a B2B client.

The best day of deployment can vary based on industry and target audience (i.e. purchasing agents vs. Moms vs. Teens). In terms of the best time of day to deploy campaigns, the trends are equally inconsistent.  They vary greatly as we've seen 3am, 10am, 1pm and 9pm lead within different industries and type of email program. Other variables to consider that potentially impact time and day are where they are accessing their email (i.e. desktop at office, laptop in kitchen, iPhone on the go), what the product is (i.e. car vs. clothes vs. restaurant) and what the content or call to action of the email is (i.e. coupons, product announcement, newsletter).
 
We always recommend taking into consideration the who, what, where and then developing a testing strategy to determine what is best for specific brands and audience.  

Have you built out a plan for testing what day and time works best for your email marketing program? Leave a post on this blog or feel free to contact me at marketing@yesmail.com   

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Michael Sebastian at prdaily.com recently released an article mentioning a Baydin study that identified the 7 words to avoid using in an email subject line. Those 7 words are: Confirm, Join, Assistance, Speaker, Press, Social, and Invite. As it becomes... More

Michael Sebastian at prdaily.com recently released an article mentioning a Baydin study that identified the 7 words to avoid using in an email subject line. Those 7 words are: Confirm, Join, Assistance, Speaker, Press, Social, and Invite. As it becomes harder to reach your customer's inbox, understanding different variables in your strategic email marketing will be essential to your success.

Let's speculate as to why those particular 7 words seem to be least effective. Words like Join, Confirm and Invite often pertain to attending an event. This could be anything from an on-site conference, a round-table discussion, a product demo, a webinar or any virtual meeting. As an experienced professional in the digital marketing field, I've discovered that many people tend to avoid events they learn about only via the email channel. They typically have previous knowledge of the event or they learn about it through multi-channel promotions, reviews, articles or peer recommendations. Even if a recipient knows who the email is from and has signed up for that communication, it is often the case that he/she has no interest in the advertised event unless a word that describes it is in the subject line, and that word relates to something that is of interest to the recipient.

On the other end of the spectrum, two words that are found to be particularly effective in eliciting an engagement are Demo and Conference. Thus, you are much more likely to garner a response by crafting an email subject line that is as straight-forward as possible about what your email is promoting. This way, with the proper email segmentation in place, your audience will receive an email, informative from the get-go and uniquely tailored to their interests.

On a similar note, words like Press and Social often pertain to the sharing of news. However, when used in an email subject line, they become the general focus as opposed to a specific news story that can be of interest to the recipient.

In general, as a best practice, avoid using broad terms in a subject line to describe events. It takes away focus from the specific goal and instead promotes the general. Many of us are too busy to open something that may or may not contain useful information.

Expanding on these thoughts, we wanted to find out what industries are most frequently using these 7 naughty words in their email subject lines. In order to perform this research, we used Yesmail Market Intelligence, a uniquely versatile tool that combines social media and email monitoring to power competitive and market intelligence from a single, centralized console. It provides detailed analytics behind each digital campaign by marketer, campaign type, industry vertical and channel. We segmented all email campaigns we have in our database and pulled marketers that have used one or more of these words in their campaign subject lines. Here is what we found:

The Advertising/Marketing industry uses one or all of those 7 words in 12% of their email deployments.

This isn't a surprising discovery considering that marketers in this vertical are often promoting events and inviting email recipients to join social tweet-ups, guest speaker discussions, webinars and many more. In fact the most frequently used word out of the 7, is Social with 62% of its overall usage coming from the Marketing/Advertising industry.

Interestingly, those 7 words are used in 10% of Beer & Alcohol email campaigns.

The adult beverage industry is often deploying emails that aim to highlight the social nature of buying alcohol. This practice is often obvious in TV ads and has proven effective within the industry.

One or all of the 7 words are used in 16% of radio email campaigns vs. only 8% of TV email campaigns.
 
This difference could be due to the fact that radio email campaigns are not as advanced as television ones. The marketing department budget may not allow much time for testing and weighing different email subject lines. An additional consideration for this discrepancy may come from the way people view radio. Tuning in for a radio broadcast has a strikingly different nature than it did in the past. This act can now be viewed as an event vs. an everyday occurrence. In order to get an email recipient to take action and tune into a radio program, a marketer must invite them to join. An additional consideration is the fact that radio stations tend to host speakers and market them as events via their email communications.

Despite the presence of the word Press among the 7 least effective words, the News Media vertical uses one or more of those words in only 1% of email deployments.

Email recipients often tend to overlook the value of emails that advertise press releases. If Press is in the subject line, a recipient is more likely to avoid opening the email. However, if the subject line contains the headline of the press release and, based on proper segmentation, the headline proves to be of interest to the recipient, then the email will most likely be opened. Interestingly, 25% of the total usage of the word Press comes from Clothing & Fashion Vertical and the Group Buy vertical (daily deal sites such as Groupon, Living Social, Eversave).

54% of usage of the word Invite comes from Travel & Tourism, Department Stores, Magazine/Publication, and Internet Retailers verticals.
 
It is not really surprising that Travel and Tourism is inviting people to take action. However, if marketers in that industry are more specific about the event/trip/activity they are promoting, right from the subject line, they may be able to entertain more email opens, clicks, and, ultimately, conversions. A common theme in these emails is "We invite you to join..." followed by something fairly generic or a text that is being cut off due to the inbox preferences of many email recipients. Again, many of us are too busy to open something that may or may not contain useful information.

Upon dissecting the Yesmail Market Intelligence database and getting a good idea of which marketers and verticals are using these unsuccessful 7 words we can understand the behavior of many email recipients.  In order to elicit a response, your email communication, starting from the subject line, needs to be specific in terms of the product or service you're promoting and the action you're prompting your recipients to take.

What words deter you from opening an email or prompt you to immediately hit delete?
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There are Super Bowl ads, and then there are Super Bowl campaigns.  Brands that understand the need to have fully integrated digital campaigns will receive the most benefits, garner the greatest customer interaction, and achieve the most long-term success.  We... More

There are Super Bowl ads, and then there are Super Bowl campaigns.  Brands that understand the need to have fully integrated digital campaigns will receive the most benefits, garner the greatest customer interaction, and achieve the most long-term success.  We used Yesmail Market Intelligence to identify which brands were using the top four digital channels (email, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) to promote their big game ad.  Acura's 'Transactions' campaign, featuring Jerry Seinfeld, was an instant match for our search criteria. Yesmail Market Intelligence profiled this campaign's digital lifecycle to help illustrate the importance of using all 4 channels together.

The Pre-Game:
Acura's 'Transactions' Multi-Channel Deployment Breakdown:
Acura kicked off the 'Transactions' campaign on January 30th (six days before the Super Bowl) by uploading the commercial to YouTube and promoting it through Facebook and Twitter.  The campaign timeline below showcases Acura's usage of the top four digital channels to promote the 'Transactions' campaign.
On February 1st Acura used email, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to cross promote the campaign.  These campaigns have been highlighted below:

Email: Jerry Seinfeld is #2 on the list.
Facebook:
Twitter:
YouTube:
Post-Game:
Acura continued promoting this campaign from Feb 6-12 encouraging users to view this campaign and provide feedback.

Multi-Channel Campaign Total: 48
Yesmail Market Intelligence was easily able to tally that Acura deployed 48 campaigns across the 4 digital channels promoting their Super Bowl spot 'Transactions'.

Total Social Engagements: 18,719,371
Yesmail Market Intelligence recorded 18,719,371 direct user interactions through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube with 'Transactions'.  Given that social media promotion is virtually costless, being able to reach 18,719,371 for FREE is making a BIG statement on the need for expensive marketing mediums (TV, Radio, and Display).

The Wrap-up:
When done right, conventional creative television ads are a great way to reach a large number of eyes but in order to optimize them, they can no longer be standalone assets.  In order to achieve the greatest long-tail effect from marketing efforts, marketers need to develop fully integrated campaigns that optimize digital channels to support and promote costly television ads.  The success that the Acura 'Transactions' campaign achieved speaks for itself.  As we profiled, allowing a 'sneak preview' of their television ad had a strong impact on interactions within their community.  Marketers utilizing this technique may consider asking viewers to enter their email address to view exclusive content ahead of schedule.  Acura could have possibly captured 500k-1M new email addresses, potential leads, if they structured the initial 'Transactions' web preview in this manner instead.

For information on how Yesmail Market Intelligence could be a vital part of your marketing strategy, please attend my upcoming webinar, "Keep your customers close and your competitors even closer". Or request a demo of Yesmail Market Intelligence today and discover how creating multi-channel strategies, similar to Acura, can help you stay ahead of the competition at sales@yesmail.com or 1-877-YESMAIL.
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Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for our recent webinar "Digital Channel Analysis: How top retailers used email, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube during the 2011 Holiday Season." I know... quite a mouthful but it basically answers the... More

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for our recent webinar "Digital Channel Analysis: How top retailers used email, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube during the 2011 Holiday Season." I know... quite a mouthful but it basically answers the question "What did the best Digital Marketers do this Season?" We know they did a LOT of things right and that was directly proven by all the ecommerce records that were broken (we share those too...).

Anyway, if you didn't get a chance to attend, here's a quick rundown and links to watch or download the presentation. Would love to hear what you think!

Our analysis was unique in that we were able to track and analyze marketing activity across multiple digital channels. Here's a quick look into the agenda -

• 2011 Holiday Season Industry Recap
• Analysis Approach (Yesmail's own Market Intelligence Tool)
• Findings & Insights of Overall Holiday Email and Social Marketing Trends
• Marketing Themes of Key Holiday Spending Periods
  • Holiday Kickoff  Nov 1 - Nov 17
  • Black Friday/Cyber Monday Nov 18 - Dec 2
  • Last Minute & Free Shipping Day Dec 3 - Dec 20
  • 2011 Holiday Wrap-up  Nov 1 - Jan 6
• Predictions for 2012 Holiday Season

A few exciting tidbits (just a few of many, many, and many) we included:

1. Average marketing deployments per channel (email, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube per day) over the holiday season. Notice the high spikes on key spending periods and low valleys on the weekends.
   
   
2. Average number of emails, tweets and Facebook postings each retailer sent/posted
   • Retailers on average sent out 2.7 Facebook posts for every 1 email
   • Retailers on average sent out 6.5 Tweets for every 1 email
   • Facebook fan bases over Holiday period grew at an average of 7%
3. Most popular promotions by channel. And in case you had ANY doubt at all, check out the following word cloud that represents a word count in subject lines (across our 100 top retailers) and visually shows the big ones. "Free" and "Shipping" were by FAR the most popular words in email subject lines during the season. Not so much in social channels...
   
   
4. On the social side of things (facebook, twitter, youtube), we share:
   1. Who the big players are per channel == (Target is exceptional...)
   2. Who is growing the fastest == (wide ranges here as channels still new and growing)
   3. Who is deploying the most == (Walmart was way busy as was Amazon)
   4. AND who is getting the most engagement == (seems Disney has a formula here)

There is more... so if you have some time, be sure to check it out here and let me know how 2011's holiday trends will fit into your 2012 strategy!

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Keeping tabs on your competition has always been a necessity for any company to protect their customer base. We see it every day with "Joe's gas station" shaving 2 cents off Shell's gas price down the road. In many organizations,... More

Keeping tabs on your competition has always been a necessity for any company to protect their customer base. We see it every day with "Joe's gas station" shaving 2 cents off Shell's gas price down the road. In many organizations, analyzing a competitor's online marketing strategy has fallen into the hands of everyone from the email marketing associate to the senior marketing director.

A few years ago, this was a very manageable task signing up for newsletters and email marketing programs. However, since the onslaught of social media, this effort has become a very daunting time-consuming process. Not only must marketers stay on top of competitor's email marketing campaigns, but marketers now must be aware of their competition's Facebook fan pages, Youtube videos, Twitter campaigns, etc...you get the idea.

Having all these different avenues to communicate with the ever evolving customer gives your rival more of an opportunity to get their message in front of your customers...whether that be a catchy viral YouTube clip or a last minute Valentine's gift promotion email. The need for a multi-channel competitive intelligence tool has never been more of a necessity. Up to this point, there has been no easy way to track all of these dominant digital channels within one centralized view...until now.

Using Yesmail Interactive's latest Market Intelligence solution enables the marketer to easily analyze their competitor's marketing strategy. It allows marketers to compare a brand's campaign deployments while reviewing engagement and digital channel ranks. The quicker they can understand emerging trends, themes and multi-channel strategies, the faster they can apply these insights to their own future campaign strategies.
 

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