Five Email-Marketing Predictions for the Holiday Season

The George Santayana quote “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” applies to email marketers as much as to anyone else. That’s one reason Chad White, research director at Smith-Harmon, a division of Responsys, put together the “Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season 2010,” a white paper that reviews last year’s email marketing campaigns to help marketers with their efforts this year.

Based on last year’s trends, White has made five predictions regarding email marketing for this coming holiday season:

1) There will be more activity on Thanksgiving. Last year Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) was the busiest day for retail email in terms of volume, with 71% of the retailers tracked by White sending at least one promotional email. Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) was close behind, with 69% sending messages on that day. “Last year there was a substantial uptick in the number of people on Sunday rather than [Cyber] Monday, to get a jump-start” and stand out from the Cyber Monday inbox glut, White says.

For the same reason, he’s predicting that more retailers will try to get a lead on Black Friday by sending email on Thanksgiving. Online-only one-day sales will dominate inboxes the day before Thanksgiving and early Thanksgiving Day, but by Thanksgiving afternoon they’ll give way to “early bird” promotions of Black Friday sales.

Which leads to the question: If the overwhelming majority of retailers are going to be sending promotional emails on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, might you be better off not bothering trying to contact people on those days?

As with everything else related to email marketing, the answer is “It depends.” “There’s definitely a degree of ‘you have to be in it to win it,’” White says. “If you have a great deal to pitch, you’ve got to be there, but if you don’t, don’t bother getting into the fray.”

2) “Social and rich media campaigns are not going to have legs after mid-November,” White predicts. “Once you get into the core of the holiday season, email subscribers are not really interested.” Many consumers opt in just prior to or during the holiday season solely to receive email offers and discount codes and will in fact unsubscribe come January. These shoppers don’t care much about your brand, and they certainly don’t have time to watch videos, play games, and the like.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you should cancel any rich media campaigns you have planned. You might want to begin them earlier, though, or send them to only to customers while sending new subscribers different messaging.

3) More retailers will include discount codes into their preheader text. White describes this as a “small but growing trend” that he thinks more retailers should adopt. The preheader is the small initial text that appears prior to the body of an email message. Because it is text and not a graphic, it is readable even if the recipient’s ISP or mail client is blocking images. Given how many emails are initially rendered without images, you can’t afford not to maximize your preheaders.

4) More emails will feature share-with-your-network (SWYN) links as a strong secondary call to action. “Don’t settle for having SWYN links in your preheader or footer,” White says. “Put it right next to your primary call-to-action button in your message. According to Responsys, email recipients are up to seven times more likely to use SWYN links, which easily allow recipients to post content from an email to their Facebook wall, Twitter feed, or other social media networks, than forward-to-a-friend buttons.

5) Mobile-friendly emails will become more common. A recent Nielsen study showed that 42% of all time spent on mobile devices was used to read and send email, making that the number-one activity on smartphones and similar devices. For that reason, White advises ensuring that your promotional emails can easily be read on mobile devices: Use larger font sizes, make sure there is a decent amount of white space around calls to action so that users don’t get tangled up with other hotlinks, and keep the message width to 600-650 pixels.