With the right strategy and technology, email can drive unprecedented revenue in a very short amount of time.
That’s the happy holiday news that fashion retailer Torrid received following one very successful holiday email campaign. A data-driven strategy and the addition of real-time technology came together at just the right time to deliver the highest revenue hour in the company’s history.
If that sounds like a gift your brand could use this holiday season, see how Torrid outperformed its holiday email goals and adapt these lessons for your own campaigns.
Torrid delivers sophisticated email campaigns throughout the holiday season. But like many retailers it puts a special focus on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping period.
The company had ambitious goals and set specific targets related to increasing traffic (both to the site as well as its online store), driving incremental revenue, and achieving other aggressive goals for the holiday season.
We all know how big these shopping days are, but their growth rates—and the opportunity they represent—can still come as a surprise. In 2018, an estimated 164 million people were planning holiday shopping sometime during the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. Black Friday was the single busiest day, with 116 million people reporting that they planned to shop that day.
In 2018, Cyber Monday hit nearly $8B in total sales, making it the largest online shopping day in U.S. history, and topping even Black Friday ($6.2B) in terms of online sales. Both Black Friday and Cyber Monday demonstrated significant year-over-year growth (20% and 23.6%, respectively), leading many analysts and retailers to think that 2019 will be even bigger.
Torrid wanted to create an engaging new Black Friday/Cyber Monday email experience to achieve its goals of maximizing campaigns sales and overall revenues.
The retailer’s marketing team came up with an innovative approach: to build emails that displayed a countdown timer that counted down to the end of each one of the company’s special live (limited time) promotions.
Using the RealTime Email platform, Torrid designed highly personalized, extremely relevant content using customized messages and open-time data. When a specific promotion expired, the hero image disappeared, but it was replaced by a brief message telling the customer to visit the Torrid site to view the latest promotions and deals.
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Torrid found that these new emails led to new levels of customer engagement and urgency, both of which increased sales—from the email promotion as well as the site—as well as total traffic. Most importantly, customers paid attention to the countdown timer and made their purchases before the promotion expired.
Swapping in dynamic content as offers changed over time enabled the brand to update its emails with the latest, most relevant messaging even after they were already sent and opened. This helped Torrid gain incremental revenue from campaigns sent days, even weeks, earlier.
Even expired promotions led to revenue spikes and new traffic to the retailer’s site, with 37% of opens and a 3.6% click-through rate occurring after the sale ended. An updated image and CTA after the sale had expired created a large and long tail of continued site visits and sales well into the holiday season.
Torrid’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns were a success by any conventional measure. Traffic numbers increased over company and industry benchmarks. Total clicks, total opens, click-through rates, and conversions surged.
But most important, Torrid hit the single highest revenue hour in company history and significantly exceeded its revenue goals. With Liveclicker, Torrid was able to achieve goals where they matter most: top-line revenue growth and a stronger bottom line.
For more details on Torrid’s holiday strategy and results, download the complete case study here.
The Torrid case study is just one example of how email marketing innovation can make this holiday season your most productive yet. For even more ways to drive greater revenue and overcome traditional holiday headaches, be sure to check out our ebook: Real-Time Solutions to 9 of Retail Marketers’ Biggest Holiday Email Headaches.
More than our gift to you, it’s your way to find other tips, tricks, and effective examples from leading retailers to reach customers throughout the holiday cycle!
As a retail email marketer, you are probably planning your year-end holiday marketing campaigns right now.
Anyone outside our industry may be surprised to hear this, especially since Black Friday and Cyber Monday—generally regarded as the first of the major winter holidays—are still four months away. Yet there are real advantages to developing your holiday marketing strategies as early as possible.
For example, a report from NRF shows that 40% of consumers plan on starting their holiday shopping before November 1, a number that includes a substantial 12% who reported that they will begin before September 1. When you think about it this way, holiday shopping could start in less than eight weeks!
Source: NRF’s Annual October Holiday Consumer Survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics
It also looks like 2019 will be a banner year in terms of total consumer spending. The same NRF study found that in 2018, the average American shopper spent $846 on gifts, which represented a 14% increase over 2017. With the stock market, labor market, and consumer confidence numbers at, or near, all-time highs, holiday spending is likely to increase again this year.
On one hand, such positive news represents significant opportunities for retail marketers today, especially those who are contemplating their holiday campaigns now. Yet on the other, it may actually lead to more questions than answers. For example, many marketers may wonder:
The good news is that there is a way to accomplish all of these goals: real-time email personalization. The value of personalization is well documented, to the point where research shows that marketers who use advanced personalization tactics have greater email revenue than those that don’t.
Despite these results, a surprisingly high number of campaigns are still being deployed without meaningful personalization. For example, a 2018 research report found that nearly 40% of marketers said that they almost never personalized their emails in the previous year.
Even when brands do use some type of personalization, it is often limited to the same basic customization many marketers have been using for years: a first name in the greeting, a recent purchase in the body, or adding the recipient’s company name without much thought.
These tactics can be effective—and at least are a step in the right direction—but today’s consumers have come to expect much more. To catch their attention and gain a sustainable advantage over your competition, consider using email personalization in innovative new ways throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
For example, consider the following real-time personalization use cases to improve the way you engage with three very different segments of holiday shoppers: Early Birds, Seasonal Shoppers, and Procrastinators.
Help the Early Birds find the perfect worm
As described earlier, nearly a quarter of consumers will start shopping for holiday gifts before October 1. While they’re motivated to get it done, time is still on your side.
An astonishing 42% of companies don’t survey their customers or collect feedback. Consider using in-email polls or other interactive ways to collect valuable information about what is important to Early Birds and then use real-time personalization to create highly relevant email experiences.
In this case, you could create a poll where you ask them what special products are most appealing this holiday season. Here’s a great example from Taubman Centers asking subscribers what they love most about the new season:
Or you could ask other questions related to what they prefer most when purchasing holiday gifts, such as discounts, increased loyalty points, flash sales, special promotions, or free shipping. You can use polls to ask many different questions, so be as creative as possible.
These polls are delivered in the email itself, which leads to a fun, engaging experience your audience may not expect. Recipients click to answer the question and can see how their answers stack up to other responses in real time. You can even use this as an opportunity to offer initial discounts or holiday promotions!
But the real value is the specific information you’ll receive about each individual consumer. You can then send customized emails that give them exactly what they’re looking for. They’ll love it!l
Deliver ideal experiences for Seasonal Shoppers
Consumers who prefer to shop in October and November are looking for ways to get the best deals possible while making sure they don’t run into inventory issues.
It’s a real concern, since popular items tend to move fast during the holidays. If you’re not careful, you can send emails that feature products that are out of stock, priced higher than expected, or are temporarily unavailable.
This inevitably leads to a frustrating experience for customers who were ready to pull the trigger on a specific item or sale. Heavily promoted or discounted products can have out-of-stock rates of 10% or more, and out-of-stock experiences are consistently named among the most frustrating for consumers. An initial out-of-stock encounter results in a 30% chance of that customer turning to a competitor and not returning, a rate that increases to 50% and then 70% with subsequent experiences.
Real-time personalization can make the difference between success and failure. You can avoid promoting sold-out products by keep your customers’ favorite product categories up to date with the most appealing selections that are currently available on your website. Then you can create personalized emails that display their preferred items by scraping images and content directly from those web pages—in the moment of open.
Hot Topic used this tactic to reveal hot new products as they came available, and then swap or gray out items that became sold out:
In the case that a product is out of stock or removed from the category page, your email reverts to a graceful fallback option that serves up the next best option. Customers will never know, and they’ll even appreciate the additional options for the perfect purchase.
Give Procrastinators a way to save the day
When the clock is ticking, Procrastinators need as much help as possible. Yet with real-time personalization, desperate times don’t have to lead to desperate measures.
For example, you can send emails that use recipients’ geotargeting data to create maps that show your closest store location to save them time and effort. White House Black Market used this feature to drive subscribers in-store for New Year’s Eve dress shopping:
You can also add a countdown timer as a fun way to communicate important information, such as the last possible time to take advantage of extended holiday hours or a free shipping deadline. Once the deadline has passed, swap out the countdown timer with a link to buy an online giftcard instead. You can even add a deadline to their calendar to remind them to shop, but also to encourage them to shop with you.
It may sound a bit funny, but we’d like to wish you a happy holidays, and more specifically, a happy and productive holiday planning season. This year, consider innovative new personalization strategies to connect with consumers—no matter when they might be shopping.
We hope you’ve been enjoying our articles on holiday-related email marketing ideas, and that each one gives you valuable ideas you can use in your ongoing email marketing efforts. We enjoy providing specific tips and real-world examples, so stay tuned for additional updates, or you can always download our Holiday Email Personalization LookBook for more illustrated examples all in one place.
It’s time to focus on the next big holiday coming up: Father’s Day Email Marketing (June 16 for 2019).
By some measures, Father’s Day isn’t as big as it could be. According to research from the National Retail Federation, Americans spent a total of $23.1 billion on Mother’s Day in 2018. Yet for Father’s Day, that figure reached just $15.3 billion. Similarly, NRF found that where 86% of Americans celebrate Mother’s Day, only 77% do the same for Father’s Day.
To help make a bigger splash for Dad this year, here are 15 ways you can use advanced real-time personalization experiences in your Father’s Day email marketing campaigns this year (or for any holiday)!
Finally, become an email personalization ninja by combining many of these real-time advanced email experiences into one campaign or customer experience. You’re bound to create memorable, engaging, simply-can’t-resist types of email experiences any father will appreciate.
In our first Mother’s Day article, we highlighted U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer’s recent success using real-time personalization strategies in its Mother’s Day emails and landing pages. These included the use of countdown timers to create shopping urgency and geotargeted maps to help consumers find the closest store to shop.
In our second Mother’s Day article, we want to offer five additional tips you can use to create engaging, memorable emails for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or any holiday.
Don’t miss your chance
According to the NRF, Mother’s Day was the fourth biggest consumer shopping event in 2018, trailing only “Back to School,” “Back to College,” and “Winter Holidays.” After looking at the results from holidays that have occurred in 2019, it looks like this trend will continue.
In this way, Mother’s Day represents a blessing and a curse. On one hand, these numbers are proof that shoppers are spending, and hopefully from you. But if they’re not, it means you must rise above your competitors to capture their attention.
To help, here are five ways any email marketer can use real-time personalization to create highly engaging, highly relevant, and highly effective Mother’s Day emails.
Last year, grocery giant Kroger created a fun Mother’s Day email that offered casual, catchy call-to-action buttons, such as “Get toasty” to promote a new salmon toast recipe and “Let’s get crackin’” in reference to an egg-inspired brunch.
Such an approach helped differentiate Kroger’s marketing, but the brand really took it up a notch by adding an interactive poll to its campaign. In this case, the email creative asked readers a specific question: “What are you getting Mom this year?” The email included one-click options such as flowers, chocolate, gift cards, and beauty products, and Liveclicker’s LivePoll advanced personalization experience actually displayed the responses in real time.
This experience connected with shoppers in new ways. Not only could they see how they measured against other poll responses, but they got valuable shopping ideas to make Mother’s Day truly special. Fun!
The idea of embedding videos into emails has always had a bad rap in email marketing, even though it’s it’s easier than you might think. It’s also extremely effective: Research shows that those brands that use video in emails experience open rate increases of 19% and click-through rate increases of 50% or more.
Get creative with video! Imagine the appeal of a Mother’s Day email featuring a video that celebrates all that mothers do or promotes a special Mother’s Day event at one of your stores or locations. No one else is doing this today, which makes it the perfect opportunity to cut through the marketing clutter and noise.
If you’d like to learn how three leading brands transformed traditional emails with embedded video, you can read their stories here.
If your company uses loyalty programs, consider personalizing emails by displaying account balances in the email itself. You can be even more creative by showing them how many more steps they need to hit a certain threshold, or what these points could get them today—two tactics that subtly promote spending.
You can even animate their account balances using our LiveRender advanced email experience. This becomes an effective way to show customers how far they’ve come—and how much they can gain. Specific tangible rewards are always much more attractive to consumers.
Just this week, someone asked me, “When is Mother’s Day this year?” It shows you how this day tends to sneak up on is, especially for shoppers already overwhelmed with school, kids’ sports, and so many other activities that consume our time.
Innovative marketing teams can communicate this using personalization capabilities that count down to Mother’s Day or put a reminder on their calendar. For example, you could let shoppers know the absolute last day they can order a gift and still get it delivered in time.
We recently wrote an article that showed how LG is using pollen counts—yes, pollen counts—to promote its line of air filters, washers, and other products.
This is possible with a real-time personalization capability that offers local weather forecasts within the email itself. Using this information, companies with outdoor products and services could offer a last-minute email to get them to attend. Similarly, if the weather is bad, other companies, such as restaurants, stores, museums, or theaters, and more, may consider sending an email to get people to come inside.
This Mother’s Day, make the most of the moment by engaging your audience with personalized content and surprising new email experiences. When you think about it, such an approach really represents all of us “trying our best,” an outcome any mother would appreciate!
Now that it’s officially May, it means another holiday is right around the corner: Mother’s Day!
This is a big event for moms–and for marketers. 84% of US adults are expected to celebrate the event this year, and overall spending related to the holiday is forecasted to reach nearly $25 billion dollars!
Mother’s Day (May 12) is coming up fast, but it’s not too late to create and send engaging email campaigns that will connect with your audience in meaningful new ways (and encourage them to shop with your brand).
(P.S. Now is also a good time to think about what you’re doing for your own Mother’s Day celebrations!)
Marks & Spencer recently achieved exactly this type of success with its Mother’s Day marketing efforts. Instead of ignoring the fact that valuable shopping days were slipping by, the U.K. retailer embraced this inevitability by creating a countdown timer to show consumers exactly how much time was left before this important event.
It was a smart strategy. Like any other holiday, Mother’s Day tends to sneak up on shoppers, or they may procrastinate, thinking that they have more time than they actually do. In this case, Marks & Spencer’s countdown timer was perceived as a helpful tool—not just another sales email—since no one wants to disappoint Mom on her one special day of the year. In other words; thank you, Marks & Spencer!
In one email, Marks & Spencer overlaid its countdown timer over an image of stunning floral arrangements. The headline encouraged recipients to “spoil Mum with beautiful blooms,” and also included a prominent special offer of a free delivery of her bouquet in time for Mother’s Day. While the free delivery offer wasn’t tied to the countdown timer, the message to act was clear. Who could resist?
In a second email, the retailer used a timer in conjunction with an offer that would quickly expire. In this case, the email included a special promotion where shoppers would receive free chocolates with the purchase of a Mother’s Day bouquet. The countdown clock showed recipients just how much time they had to act, a powerful real-time personalization that helped increase basket size and generate new sales.
The personalization didn’t stop there. By clicking into either email, consumers experienced a Marks and Spencer landing page with even more Mother’s Day promotions, including discounts on brunch ingredients, wine, chocolate, flowers, and more.
Each offer was accompanied by a call to action button that invited readers to find the closest Marks & Spencer shop. These links used Liveclicker’s LiveMap real-time email experience to incorporate geo-targeting map information specific to each consumer. Again, the entire experience provided information consumers found helpful, while still encouraging them to take the desired action.
Using countdown timers and maps are just two examples of how you can create engaging, personalized emails this Mother’s Day. Stay tuned for our second article in this series where we will provide even more examples of real-time personalization that you can use for Mother’s Day email campaigns.
Also, this is the latest article in our ongoing series of holiday-related tips, tricks, and other email marketing best practices. Yet there’s another way to get them all, all in one place. Download our LookBook guide for real-world examples of how leading brands achieved impressive results for any holiday—and every other point in the customer lifecycle.