Learning from last year
Return Path specialists suggest that you look thoroughly at your last Holiday Season results before you start planning this year’s campaigns – a great way to improve your results. Here is very useful summary:
1. Did you track the right KPIs? Do your reports give you enough insight so that you can accurately evaluate success?
2. Which types of campaigns worked? Which didn’t? What does “worked” mean?
- Look at which had the highest open rate even if it didn’t convert well.
- Then look at your click-through rates. Did the higher open rate correlate with a high click-through rate?
- Did the high click-through rate correlate with high conversion?
3. Did you do any testing last year? If not, plan on doing it this year.
4. Look at what you didn’t do and try something totally different this year to see if you get a boost.
What Haunts Email Marketers
Rick Buck is inspired by Halloween to share his reflections about what he considers some email marketing “urban legends”:
certain words or characters that will flag your email as spam and no one will ever see your email again; consumers are more receptive to emails at certain times of day or on particular days of the week
; emailing inactive subscribers will somehow wake them up just in time to contribute to the bottom line.
Social Email Marketing: How to encourage sharing wisely, not randomly
Adam T. Sutton of Marketing Sherpa explains how just adding ‘social sharing buttons’ on the bottom of your email won’t do the job by itself!
