Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Email Campaigns during the Holiday Shopping Season

Given the upcoming holidays, I was interested to read about online habits and how best to configure an online campaign to capture the target audience when they are most susceptible to messaging. I think that the Obama campaign's email strategy has always been interest -- engaging titles; short, easily digestible content; clear call to action; and a branded voice for a variety of senders.

As a nonprofit my biggest competition at this time of year for an email solicitation campaign is online shopping. I have yet to find research that highlights any association between online shopping and online donating. Nevertheless, I was interested to understand the prime days for online shopping. Experian recently released a report that looks at online activity in terms of research and transactions as well as the volume of email sent on these peak days. In addition to being valuable information, I find it to be tremendously interesting. Many of the top ten "transaction" days for online activity are not in the top ten for "volume of emails sent" on that day. Given these statistics, one would guess that online retailers should consider adding Thanksgiving or Black Friday emails to their roster.

1 comment:

Miguel Gonzalez said...

Karen - this is a very interesting article and something I have never thought about. As I sit here thinking of why there is a discrepancy, I can only come up with the idea that the shopping is being done over cell phones and therefore email is tracked differently. The article does not mention how they are tracking this data and whether cell phone use for utilized in this comparison.

The other question that comes to mind is, how do you capitalize on this information? As a retailer, I would think the best way is (as you mentioned) to launch an email campaign on the busiest shopping days of the season.

Great article and yet another example of how companies need to get smarter in their use of digital media.