VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

50 All-Time Great Retail Subject Lines

Here at VerticalResponse we're always being asked things like, "What is the best day to send email?", "What are the real email marketing secrets?" and "What are great subject lines?". I decided to focus this post on that last one, and offer some really great and proven-to-work subject lines that you can test out for your email marketing campaigns.

First of all, I'm assuming at this point that your recipients will recognize you from your "From Label". I've written why your From Label is very important in your email marketing campaigns. If they are familiar with who the email is coming from, you'll have better luck getting your email opened with a catchy subject line.

As a retailer your email marketing campaigns are probably all about selling. If you sell your own products or products from other manufacturers, you'll be trying to announce new products, new seasons or discounts and sales. You'll want your recipients to act fast, so you may want to try expiration dates in your subject line. We even see businesses using hours in the day in their expiration time periods.

You'll see that some of these subject lines are a bit vague like "An Exclusive Offer for You", however sometimes that might get more opens than if you talk about a specific product. That's something that you need to test for yourself in your own campaigns.

Offer, Offer, Offer

Enjoy this Special Offer at Our New Location

25-40% off - Email-Only Offer – Today Only

Invitation-Only 2 Hour Event Starts 11:30 AM CT

Ends Today! 20% Off Friends & Family

Top 10 under $10

Free shipping - offer ends in 3 days

Free product with purchase of [product name]

[New Product] has arrived. Order now before we run out.

Earn double points for [insert product or action].

Last Chance: Get up to $25 now

Save 10% on your next order

Enjoy [season] with rates from $65

Service Notice: Exciting new changes at [your company]

An Exclusive Offer for You

[Your company] October Specials

Last minute deals, special offers, and new [product name]

Act Now to renew your [subscription name]

Online only: 25% off friends and family

Introducing our latest…[product/feature here]

[Product name] Promotion week. Save 25%

Extended for a day! Get Free shipping through Friday

Stock up and save 15%

Limited Supply: Limit 2 [product name] per customer

Ho-ho-ho: The [your company] holiday catalog is here!

Email subscriber exclusive: [Product name] sale is here

Ends Today: Take 20% off your entire order

Private Sale Ends Today

Your choice of amazing items $50 + under

Great gifts for [Dad, Mom, etc]

Best Sellers every [girl, boy, man, woman, dog, etc.]

Everything you need when the temperatures [rise, fall]

Free Shipping--Limited Time Offer

Catchy & Creative

Sometimes all you need is a little vase lift  (retailer selling vase's)

We've got you covered from head to toe (retailer selling hats, shirts, pants and boots)

How La Perla got its name (retailer selling lingerie, telling a story inside the email)

Temperatures Fall, Style Rises (retailer selling coats)

Celebrity Favorites (selling accessories that Hollywood is wearing)

Did you remember to get a gift? It's ok, we did. (retailer wanting to get people to register for gift reminders)

10 Gift Ideas for your little ones (retailer listing top 10 suggestions for kids)

Manhattan View for a Song in the Shower (retailer selling shower curtain with Manhattan skyline on it)

Take your pick: Our 9 Favorite Dresses (retailer suggesting by popularity)

Coolest modern desk on the job...for $149 (retailer including price in the subject line)

Score Great Savings on Game-Time Gear: HDTVs, Furniture & More (retailer selling TV's with a sports slant)

Party Like it's 1999 Aged Cabernet Special (wine retailer)

In our store: Last minute Mother's Day combo ready to go (retailer getting the last minute shoppers with a catch "combo to go".)

Adorn Your Home Now & Through the Holidays (Home decor retailer)

Mind-Blowing Grenache (wine retailer)

Bring this email to a Gap store and win! (retailer trying to get store traffic)

I hope this gets your creative juices flowing. You can also find some great holiday-specific subject lines here. If you've got some great subject lines that have worked for your business, comment and let us know.

Retailers: Great Internet Retailer Survey

Internet Retailer published their Holiday Sales Survey recently. It's a pretty comprehensive survey that might give retailers out there some ideas for the holiday season. It was surprising to me that most of the retailers they surveyed had sales revenue of less than 1 million annually. That really speaks to the smaller retailers weighing in rather than Target or Walmart.

The top three take-aways were that you should start marketing early, you should include gifts with a purchase and include lower priced items in the assortment you offer. Reducing prices across the board was also a big one.

On the marketing front it looks like email marketing is the big winner with regards to the tools retailers will use. A close second is paid search followed by social media in third.

In addition, most retailers will make free shipping conditional, meaning customers will have to purchase $50 or more.

All in all, 81% of the retailers surveyed think that their holiday sales will grow this year, with half of the growth being up 15% or less from the previous year. Sounds promising, let's hope so!

Remarkable Service - Worth Talking About

We talk about the "extra" things you can do to get people talking about your business or your service. We even put it on our marketing checklist of 2008. Here's a great idea you can take away if you're in the hospitality business or not.

True Story

My husband and I recently took a trip to LA and stayed at The Standard hotel downtown. I asked the concierge if they would get us reservations at the nearby Takami Sushi restaurant. She confirmed so off we went. As soon as we arrived and gave our name to the hostess she said "Ah yes, you're coming from The Standard" and she showed us to our table. Our waitress came to take our order and said, "the hotel would like to buy your appetizer." Nice. Well done to both the restaurant for remembering where they just got two new customers and the hotel for going the extra mile.

Do you have a business that lends itself to co-marketing opportunities with a neighbor?

Clothing Retailers - Give one free dry cleaning around the corner when someone purchases more than $100.
Italian Restaurants - Give one free dry cleaning when a customer spills red wine or pasta sauce on their shirt from the delicious food you serve!
Hotels - Give one day pass to the gym down the street or give a free gelato coupon to the local gelato shop.
Realtors - Give a housecleaning coupon for $50 off the first clean or a local handyman coupon.
Jewelry Shop - Give a coupon for a free basic manicure from a local nail salon if someone purchases from you.
Car Dealer - Give a coupon for a free detailing.
Online Retailers - After someone has purchased offer a discount code to a complementary product. A good example is when wine.com used to offer discount codes for Omaha Steaks after you purchased.

Hopefully your neighbors will give the coupons or gifts to you for free or heavily discounted since you just potentially walked a new customer through their doors. Then it's up to them to do a great job converting them for repeat business. Either way, both of you have the potential of looking great, just like the restaurant and the hotel.

Word of mouth isn't always a campaign you can just start, it's all of the remarkable things you do for your customers. But when they're successful, they can start to get rolling, just like me talking about the restaurant and the hotel.

Do you have any ideas on how to get word-of-mouth rolling? We'd love to hear them!

Great Customer Service Story - Are You Ready To Go Above and Beyond This Holiday Season?

One of our engineers Erik sent me this great customer service story he found online. Thanks for posting your story! This illustrates how going above and beyond translates into people saying great things about you.

Holiday Service Levels & Email Marketing (Part 2)

In our two-part series that Erin our Director of Marketing wrote, she focuses on how to handle unhappy customers as well as calculating how much business you can handle. It's a good read.

NO ONE IS 100% PERFECT, SO ACKNOWLEDGE IT

When things start to get busy this holiday season avoid ignoring complaints until after the season is over. News travels fast…bad news travels faster and further with people posting their issues all over the web! If you make the time to address service issues as they occur, you could save a customer and they are more likely to tell a friend how you turned the situation around for them and became a hero.

BE READY FOR TOO MUCH BUSINESS

If your business promises 24 hour turnaround times on orders or you ship within 2 business days, calculate your likely response rates for your offers in your email before you send your campaign. Then assess how many orders your team can ship in a single day. Remember 80% of responses come in the first 24 hours of your email being sent, so it's important that you create a strategy for sending emails to handle peaks in order volume. 

If you don't think you can meet service commitments don’t email your whole list at once. VerticalResponse's List Segmentation tool makes it easy to segment your list. Consider segmenting by region and starting promotions from the furthest locations and working your way to local offers for time-saving on shipping. Email offers to buy early in the season such as "buy before X date and receive a free gift with purchase". You can also slice your list into random segments and send a portion of your list everyday to maintain a steady flow of orders throughout the season.

If you've got more thoughts on handling the holiday rush, please comment.

Holiday Service Levels & Email Marketing (Part 1)

I'm on the road this week so I've given Erin, our Director of Marketing the task of filling my shoes! I think she's done a great job talking about things to think about during the holiday season. Erin, take it away...

The holidays can be the most lucrative time of year and the speed of email marketing makes bringing those dollars in easier and faster than ever. It's also a time of year of when buyers are more stressed and often less patient when it comes to service related issues.

How do you protect your brand and increase customer loyalty when every order is time-sensitive and emotionally charged? We've put together a few helpful tips to maintain your online zen during the holidays...

MAKE IT EASY TO ORDER

Remember there are a whole bunch of new online shoppers out there that may not be the most internet savvy individuals, this is your time to carefully walk those less savvy through the process and win them over with great service for the rest of the year.

A few questions to ask yourself about your online order process...

• Can they change quantities or sizing on the shipping screen?
• Do you explain turnaround times upfront? Are the number of steps to completing an order understood so they understand how many screens they will walk through to completing an order?
• Do you let the customer know when they should expect their confirmation or transactional emails (within minutes or within days?)
• Do you include instructions for returns in confirmation emails so they can pass along to a recipient?

DRIVE RETAIL TRAFFIC

If shipping in higher volumes can be a challenge for you to fulfill or you're also looking to drive retail traffic, consider sending a "buy online and pick up in the store" email offer. One of the big electronic retailers promotes this every year with television commercials. It also provides an additional opportunity to up-sell customers in a retail location and build a personal relationship. Another chance to prove your service promise!

We didn't want to bog you down too much, so look for part 2 in a few days. Any ideas are more than welcome.

Here Come the Holidays! 7 Tips to Get You Ready Now

If your business is anything like ours here at VerticalResponse, you're pretty hectic from now until the end of the year. We've jotted down some ideas to get you thinking and acting now. By the way, some of this post is targeted at those business that sell retail and ship things, but you can apply most of this list to your business even if you don't.

Here are things you'll need to think about for each of your holiday email marketing campaigns:

1. Calendar Out Your Activities - Use the free Interactive Marketing Calendar (or that paper calendar that's on your desk). The Calendar Link is located in the top nav bar in your VR Account. You can easily input important tasks such as writing copy, upload images and  launch, or just write them down. Either way get something tangible you can look at.

2. 80% of your clicks come within 1 day - It's a good rule of thumb so you may want to work this into your calendar as well. Then you can project how long you'll need before you want to potentially reach out to your recipients again.

3. Your Subject Line - I've said it before I'll say it again:
    Don't repeat your from label in your subject line
    Be smart about your first 40 characters, put the most important info up front
    Check out this post for some super subject line tips   

4. Guarantee Shipping - Decide on the date when you'll guarantee shipping before a holiday. Call your shipper to see when they're guaranteeing delivery then pad this so you won't have negative customer service issues in the case where a shipment isn't made. Use this date in your email marketing campaigns as it gets closer to the looming deadline.

5. Retail Locations - If you're staying open late to capitalize on #4 above, make sure you heavily market this in your emails.

A note to #4 & #5 above, gift cards rule! eMarketer published a report noting that gift card sales will rise 25% this year over last and that most people buy them in store, however a surprising 26% of gift cards will be bought online, so you may want to include that in your email marketing campaigns.

6. Include Forward to a Friend Link - It's many times forgotten, but you might pick up a few new customers from your current ones.

7. Host Your Emails on a Web Page - There is going to be so much email flying around the next few months you might see an increase in recipient's spam filters stripping out images (see previous post about this). If you include a link that says "Click Here to View This Email in a Browser" your recipients that are having issues can view your email as a web page. Just select it in the pulldown in Canvas or select the box in Wizard. Either way, we'll host it for free for you.

It's not too early to get your holiday schedule nailed down. It will be one less thing you have to think about. Now there will be one less than a million!

eMarketer Study - Retail Ecommerce Sales for Q2, Up, Up and Away!

Q2 was the strongest Q2 ever as far as US online retail sales went, a cool $31.8 bill which is just 3.1% of all retail sales in this country. The year is projecting to be $131 billion total.

In another report that eMarketer published, "The State of Retailing Online 2007," a report sponsored by Shop.org and conducted by Forrester Research, US online sales of apparel, footwear and accessories (excluding jewelry) will reach $22.1 billion in 2007, a 21% increase over 2006.

What shocked me was that these three categories drove more business than computer hardware and software!

One thing of note all of you retailers will be happy about, email marketing was third after TV and the Internet for best to reach your adult audiences so happy emailing! It's certainly helping drive these healthy numbers.

Holidays...here we come. We'll be ready for you retailers.

Andy Sernovitz, Word of Mouth Guru, Interviews VR!

VerticalResponse was paid a visit at ebay Live in Boston some time ago by Word of Mouth Marketing Author, Andy Sernovitz.

Check out the short interview with Nick Marden our Chief Architect Engineer (and Bostonian), Patricia Callaway our Marketing Manager, and Alf Brand our Director of Marcom as they sit back in the VR Lounge at the event and talk to Andy about email marketing and retailers!

Interesting Retail Statistics from eMarketer

eMarketer reported two very cool Retail reports out this week. Check them out.

The Online Inventory Impact Study

Check this out. Do you have an item out of stock? Forty-eight percent of the people looking for it go to another site. 25% sign up for an email alert when the item is back in stock! Be sure to have an email sign up form prominently on your site for when you don't have a product in stock!

The Multi-Channel Shopping Transformation Study

This is a great study. Looks like coupons are the way to go here. Sixty percent of the respondents received a coupon online then bought in a store. The products they shopped for tended to be bigger ticket items. They also tended to spend more in the store then they did a website.