As schools get ready to open next week in most of the country, for loyalty marketers, the holiday season looms large.
According to Experian Marketing Services’ Q2 2016 Email Benchmark Report, email can play a very important role in elevated customer engagement during the holiday season. The report shows that email volume increased 17% from a year ago, while open and transaction rates remain steady.
“While the holidays may seem far away, now is the perfect time for marketers to begin preparing for this all-important season,” said Spencer Kollas, Vice President of Global Deliverability for Experian Marketing Services. “By leveraging data from last year’s campaigns, as well as current market trends, brands can create more effective holiday marketing campaigns that increase engagement and improve the customer experience.”
What’s more, the report highlights the following five strategies that brands should consider incorporating into their holiday marketing campaigns to help boost performance:
Quality of subscriber data obtained at the point of sale (POS)
Marketers need to take the appropriate steps to improve the quality of the data obtained at the POS, as those subscribers often are highly engaged with the brand. In fact, between April 2015 and March 2016, welcome mailings to POS subscribers had a 32% higher click-to-open rate than for subscribers obtained from other sources (23.2% for POS compared with 17.5% from other sources). To ensure data quality, marketers should invest in real-time email validation technology, train store associates for data collection and have customers verify data in real time.
Social media
Targeting email subscribers based on their interest in social media can lead to high email engagement for brands. For example, welcome emails sent to subscribers who engaged via Facebook had an 11% higher click-to-open rate than other welcome emails from the same brand (22% for Facebook welcomes compared with 19.9% for other welcome emails).
Creative content
Fresh creative ideas that add a sense of urgency are an important strategy for holiday campaigns. During the 2015 holiday season, a number of brands leveraged countdown clocks that helped boost engagement performance. Marketing campaigns that included a dynamic countdown clock had a 41% higher click-to-open rate and more than double the transaction rate of other holiday mailings from the same brands.
Email personalization
Personalization can help boost performance of promotional emails. Based on data from April 2015 to March 2016, brands that included personalized subject lines experienced 27% higher unique click rates, 11% higher click-to-open rates and more than double the transaction rate compared with other promotional mailings.
Retention strategy
A proper retention strategy can help brands keep holiday-season customers throughout the rest of the year. Brands that sent “thank you for your purchase” mailings saw twice the open and click rates, as well as five times the transaction rate, compared with promotional mailings. Additionally, promotional campaigns that included “our way of saying thanks” experienced two and a half times the transaction rate of other promotional mailings.