VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

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.

Loyalty Programs - How Can You Benefit?

If you’re in business today, chances are you’ve got a group of loyal customers. The challenge is how can you get more of your customers to be loyal? Loyalty programs have been around forever and very successful.

Loyalty programs simply put, is the act of rewarding your customers for their behavior of coming back to you multiple times. So here are a few great examples of programs that might spark an idea for your business.

Rewards Cards

We’ve seen a ton of coffee shops be very successful with rewards cards. It's nothing more than a business card with 10 cups of coffee printed on it or boxes to be stamped. Each time a customer buys coffee they get one of the cups “punched” or the box “stamped”. When they reach 10 they get a free coffee. Doesn’t seem like much does it? Coffee doesn't cost that much. But customers come back. We’ve seen businesses even store the cards on behalf of the customer. This way they don’t need to remember to bring it each time they come in.

Armani does this as well. Their card comes in a tin box (fancy!) with a brochure that talks about the program and which stores are participating. Each $100 spent gets one of their 10 logos punched. When customers get the whole card punched, they get $100 off of a purchase. Cool program. Their problem? They don’t widely publicized it and there’s no email marketing around it.

At Zaza a local nail salon, if a customers buys 8 treatments, they get the 9th one free. They keep all of  treatments on file and hopefully send you an email to notify you.

At a local pet supply store, one food manufacturer gives customers a card in exchange for some personal information. The store keeps the card and for each $50 spent customers get a stamp. At then end of the card they get a discount.

Points & Rewards

If you’re a member of OpenTable and you make your restaurant reservations here, you know you get points for each reservation. For some restaurants that want to entice more people to come in, they offer more points than others. I make sure to make my reservations here not only because it’s convenient for me but also because I’m amassing points. Here I come Gary Danko!

If you shop for your business at Staples, you know that you get a certain amount of rewards for each purchase. Then you can redeem those rewards at another purchase. Makes you only want to shop at one business supply store huh?

Friend get a friend

This is a form of loyalty that promotes word of mouth. A few of our employees get vegetables from a local farm, Capay Organic, delivered to the office and their home. Erik, one of our Engineers, started it all. Then Jill saw the veggies Erik got delivered and asked about them. Erik got a free box of veggies for Jill signing up. Now they’re trying to get others to order veggies so they can get veggies free.

Our dentist gives wine for customer referrals. It’s a nice gesture from him, but it is red wine, maybe he wants us to get a whitening procedures!☺

How can you take advantage?

1. Print out some business cards that fit nicely into a wallet. Print a number of icons or boxes on them and buy yourself a unique whole punch or stamp to punch the cards. Have a box and offer to store the cards by last name. Make sure you track how many you’re giving out and track your monthly sales. You might be surprised at your growth!

2. If you’ve got a system and can track total dollars spent, send an email when a customer reaches a certain amount spent. For instance if you’ve tracked that someone has spent $500 with you, do a Loyal Customer Promotion and send them an email to get them back in.

Hi Big Spender! You’ve reached the limit! Whose limit? Ours! For your patronage we’d like to extend a 25% discount on everything in the store or on the site just for you. This will expire in 7 days so act now! Use Promo Code XRE123T, but it’s for you only so don’t share!

3. If you’ve got an offline retail location send an email about your special "After Hours" sale to your best customers. Cater it, play some music, make it a social gathering while your most loyal customers shop. They’ll either bring a friend or tell ALL their friends about it. GREAT word of mouth.

Loyalty programs can be great for any business, do you use one?