Email marketing for retailers: top advice
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 09, 2007
The email focus turns to retail promotions as the holiday spirit enters households and gently teases open purses, wallets and piggy banks.The top destination for insight into retail email practices is Chad White's RetailEmail.Blogspot site.
But a seasonal traipse around the web reveals a few other recent articles and blog posts that will also help steer your email sales in the right direction.
First up, Linda Bustos offers a long post reviewing the tips, tricks and advice that came out of a recent webinar entitled "12 Can't Miss Email Strategies for Online Retailers." Chad's blog has it covered, too.
Then Glenn Gabe gives a very detailed explanation of how to use Google's Analytics service to track the results of your email promotions after people click through to your website.
Many retailers don't have access to integrated web and email marketing analytics, so the Google workaround is a good (and cheap) alternative.
Glenn's explanation tracks results at a campaign level.
I'm wondering though whether you might use your ESP's or software's merge facility to add the email address to the analytics-friendly links you use in your emails. So you could actually tie subsequent website activity to the individual recipient?
Meanwhile, Jared Reitzin invites us to think of the different ways we can use both email and SMS (text messaging) to get people to purchase a product, complete the transaction successfully and then buy again.
Some good thoughts - particularly if you're new (like me ) to SMS.
Finally, if you've an online store, chances are you're doing PPC search marketing, too. Jamie Schissler explains why you should be capturing email opt-ins from those search visitors and what you should then do with them.
More tactics and strategies | Tags: email marketing, retail emails, web analytics, sms marketing
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1 Comments:
Hi Mark.
I wanted to respond to your question about tagging specific email addresses, so you can analyze reporting based on individual customers. In my opinion, it really depends on the campaign. There may be some campaigns that piggyback on previous email campaigns or special promotions. For these types of campaigns, I think sometimes tracking down to the customer level is valuable. For example, if you are targeting your top customers that responded to a recent offer and want to further analyze their behavior, then tagging each visitor will enable you to achieve this. That said, behavioral email marketing is becoming a hot topic now, where you can target individuals or groups based on recent behavior. Imagine emailing people that add specific items to their cart or emailing customers related product offers based on their recent activity. It is very powerful stuff! I know that Coremetrics launched their version not too long ago. http://www.coremetrics.com/solutions/targeted_email.php
There are also other uses for tagging down to the recipient level, especially for salespeople. i.e. For a B2B email blast to decision makers (within your internal list). It could be valuable for salespeople to know who responded to the email and what they did on the landing page or website. For example, did they go through your demo, did they bounce, did they download a white paper, etc. It could help structure their next conversation.
I see behavioral email becoming more and more prevalent as the technology grows stronger. It's an exciting time!
By 
Glenn Gabe, on
09 November, 2007
