The Email Wars

Almost sounds like a bad Craigslist roommate wanted posting huh? But it is actually simplicity at it finest. Why would I think this? So many apparent reasons if you have followed this blog long enough.

Well Banana Republic has been doing a bang up job lately of building time driven online and offline sales. I love the creativity of the separation of the item driven email campaign to the event based campaign. They have been building a great cadence of breaking them up each week and are getting rather aggressive early into the holiday etailing season.

1. Immediacy: Get in the store or online as you have 9 hours.
2. Clear copy, subject line, pre-headers and easy to process to know what to do.
3. Holler PROMOCODE: Still the bane of my existence is how no one has figured out how to pass that coupon code form the email to the cart without anyone needing to jump back and forth during the cart/check out experience, but at least is it CLEARLY marked. bold and even in a box drawing the idea to it.

4. The Shop Now Links – as I have written before if you are in retail and you do not know basic facts like gender, sizes and color preferences then you need to start either asking or using campaign data to shape a profile. Sure there are some chances that you might get it wrong if I was shopping for my wife today) quite convinced that is what happened with my 2 year email hate of Nordstrom (heels, swimsuits, and dress campaigns) but what you need to be doing is shaping not assuming. Actions over more than one (start at 3) campaigns make the basis of shaping profiles with action data.
5. Animated GIF from all ZEROS to slowly flip 09.09.09 – nice touch.

6. You created a shopping holiday/event out of normal day with a unique date. Big Props. The unexpected sale is the great sales. Only rough part here is I like to look at sales the night before the 1st/15th or the day of as pay days equate money in the bank and impulse purchases.

What are you doing to look at creating events, closing the sales cycle and building profiles to better communicate with your subscriber base? I hope trying to explore some of these ideas no matter your size, market or budget. Its the Shampoo Effect or Lather (Test) Rinse (Measure) Repeat (Learn) and we are all capable of learning. Note the repeat – none of us are experts, some just have a little more gray in the beard – we all can learn each and everyday – and from learning we can achieve more.

If you were worried I was going to drop into the voice of GI Joe and tell you “and knowing is half the battle” don’t worry as I caught myself there in my head too.