4 Step Checklist for Email Marketing Success

In less than 24 hours on the 11th of November last year, Alibaba experienced a US$ 11 billion upside on the inaugural launch of its Single's Day shopping festival in China. Souq reportedly turned over 600,000 items last year during White Friday. This year, they plan to sell over one million items, 50% of which will be non-electronics items.

As eCommerce companies, performance agencies and brands get ready for this year's Black Friday spree, we've compiled a checklist to ensure marketers attain the most from their email marketing efforts.

Strategy

There's no doubt that your end object is sales. So its important to note what you're selling, what pricing, its logistics and whether your targeting lines up with an audience that both wants and can afford what you have to offer. To sort through this mesh of customer data, you can use C2 to

1 - Verify your email lists by purchasing behavior and by the qualified stage of the journey said email address has taken in previous campaigns.

2 - Sort email addresses accordingly and ensure your messages line up with the various stages your target segments are at within the buyer decision journey.

3 - Set parameters that automate the re-marketing of TA's that flow through the journey you've created from open rate to click through & also instruct the program to blacklist the email addresses that do not show interest. In forgoing to do the latter last year, many marketers experienced Blacklist Friday.

Content

First impressions are everything right, so why sound like spam? As mentioned above, you can use C2 to segment your email addresses in accordance to the customer journey stage they are at. Distinguish between email addresses that

1 - are being approached for the first time. Your message tone from first to last impressions should be friendly, informative and entertaining. Do not try to sell, only navigate the reader through your content journey to raise the value prop of your offer. Then go in for the right hook.

2 - have opened your emails in the past but failed to make a purchase. Use re-marketing tools in C2 to market based on their on site browsing behavior. The context play will be huge in order to compete against the swath of participants in this year's events.

3 - actually made a purchase in the past, bucketing them based on either the brand they purchase or the brand category if you're planning to up or cross sell.

Mobile

Our experience with clients like 800Flower has repeatedly reaffirmed the finding that mobile first is the way of the future, not just as a POS for open rates and click through but also purchases & conversions. Make sure your site is prepared for any device coming its way and bear in mind screen sizes as well when mapping out reminder pop ups, preview images and buy now incentives.

Timing

While it varies exponentially with the occasion, customer segment, products, locations, day of the week, month of the year and so on - for most tangible consumer brands we've often seen that an email sent out as early as 9:00 am can result in instantaneous returns on investment & time.

That said, if you've followed the checklist above and are trying to sell items in the baby category, know that its unlikely that while the "moms" audience is awake well before 9:00 am, she is mentally unoccupied enough to be thinking about your offers until after or before she has picked her kids up from school. So further, you can tap into C2 to split test your messaging that determine's what type of moms, dads, husbands, wive (etc) you're going after.

The upside on said personalization has done wonders for our clients and we look forward to hearing about your successes in following this approach.

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