T-Minus 8 Days
Oct 08 2008
Are you ready for the holiday season? Remember when we used to think that it started in November? Well not anymore. Some brands are already talking in email about the holiday season, jumping Halloween and Thanksgiving. So what are you doing to be ready for the surge?
Here is a study about shoppers attacking earlier.
Chad White reports :
17% of the retailers I track have made at least one reference to the holiday season already.
Here is his chart from the last holiday season to show you how early it started last year.
So what, in light of the market downturn and consumer spending fears, do you have planned. This is not a business as usual year in consumer sales. I am not trying to be a “sky is falling” type of person, but those brands and email marketers that do not have a plan together are in for a bad treat.
What needs to be done? Here is my list:
1. You need a plan of attack or engagement
2. You need to be creating segments in your database to target based on profiles, past shopping, gender, timing, behavior, triggers, and even ready to change your plans on a dime if you notice emerging trends.
3. You need to be testing multiple versions of offers, creative and list segmentations.
4. You need to put yourself as a consumer in the place of your subscribers, customers, and visitors.
5. You MUST be looking at not only email marketing data, but at site analytics, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media.
My tip of the day:
Get a crash course in Yahoo Pipes. Get a handle on all the conversations happening across the web, blogs, news, social web, competitors sites/newsletters, and yes even Twitter. Using Yahoo Pipes can help you harness a lot of these things in one controllable view.
Create, if you do not have an enterprise level ecom/analytics platform, an excel spreadsheet that has these factors, campaigns, offers, back up offers and testing data. Live and breath it these next 90 days. Remember that if you are going to try and hit your goals you are going to be pulling out all the stops to get there. It is going to be a battle, and I am here to help guide you.
Good luck troops as the front line this year is going to be a battle on all fronts
Published in Behavioral Marketing, Best Of Email, Best Practices, E-Mail Marketing, Email News, eMail Marketing Optimization on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5) 
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October 8th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Nice pointers, very timely too. I’d like to explore this a little further and see how these ideas might fit for B2B marketers (since that’s my 9-5 bread and butter!) Thanks for the good info, as per usual.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:29 am
As of end of day yesterday, 30% of the retailers I track have made at least one reference to the holiday season already. I expect us to cross the 50% mark in the next 10 days. The economic crisis definitely seems to have pushed holiday email campaigns earlier in the season.
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Thanks Chad.
As of the 15th I expect EVERYONE to be in full court press. Not just retailers but B to B email marketers as well.
I know that we have 5 new campaigns in the works for next week that were already planned prior to this massive downturn. Things like: changes to welcome emails, confirmation emails, regionally based campaigns, and educational emails.
We are also still going forward with many of our new studies that will covwer more ground in the world that we play in that is not just email. Stay Tuned.