The Email Wars

Love it when I see a retailer trying something new. This past week I found that Banana Republic was doing an After Five (5pm) sale through email. Now it could have been used at either the online store or the retail location which is a great way to send traffic (people) to both your physical and online location, why should you care as long as they are buying right?

The part about this that I like (and I don’t know about their own stats) is that we see a majority of people shop online after 5pm with campaigns that we work on. So why would you not try to use time of day targeting in an email earlier in the day to remind people that the sale would be that night. It makes more sense to me to give people some early warning so that they can plan to shop after work instead of surprising them with the email at 4pm or 5pm. I mean you might have missed that window because of being late in the day.

It was also great how many times they noted that it was AFTER 5pm. When you are doing a time based sale email campaign you want to make sure that people are clear of the time to that you are not flooded with emails and phone calls (and even angry customers at a store) so repeating it so many times was a good strategy.

Nice work BR. Love to see some day parting testing going on and I hope that the tests are converting in sales in store and online. I also hope that these emails are giving you some valuable information for future campaigns.

If you aren’t testing you aren’t trying to make an impact on your programs. Get in the game.