This week in e-commerce news, two e-mail marketing firms make headlines, with Campaigner providing six tips for capitalizing on Valentine's Day and VerticalResponse announcing new tracking and reporting tools for small Web shop owners.
Ka-ching for Cupid: Valentine's Marketing Tips
E-mail marketing company Campaigner is sharing the love by offering tips to marketers on how they can leverage Valentine's Day in their holiday marketing campaigns.
"Valentine's Day is the perfect time to reach out to potential customers with gift ideas and holiday promotions," said Steve Adams, vice president of marketing for Campaigner. "Holidays can be hectic, especially when trying to find the right gift for that special someone. By giving your customers something of value such as gift ideas and special holiday offers, you are showing them that their interests are the motives behind your campaigns — building greater trust in your brand." Here are six tips for successful Valentine's e-mail promotions:
- Promote your special holiday offers up front:
Make sure your customers can immediately see that you are offering Valentine's Day specials starting at the subject line. If your customer sees an offer they can't refuse, your email will be opened.
- Offer gift ideas:Rather than letting your customers browse your site, offer gift ideas. This is a great way to help your customers find the perfect gift. You can even offer a Top 10 Popular Gift section to help aid their search for that special someone.
- Welcome those last minute shoppers: Let last minute shoppers know that they can shop with you. Offer guaranteed shipping or pick-up options to reel them in to shopping with you. This is a sure way to make an impression with a customer and to make sure they remember you next holiday season.
- Offer additional incentives: Offering additional offers like online-only coupons, discounts off future purchases, special membership pricings, etc are enticing ways to grab the attention of potentials shoppers.
- Think outside of the candy box: Flowers, candy and jewelry aren't the only things that make good Valentine's Day gifts. No matter what kind of business you have, think of creative ways for people to want to do business with you. If you are a ski resort, offer discount passes for those buying during a certain time period. If you are a restaurant, offer a special Valentine's Day menu.
- Gather additional customer information: If you don't already have customer 'friends and family' profile data, Valentine's Day can be a good opportunity to gather additional information from your customers such as important dates for them, friends, family and significant others, including birthdays and anniversaries.
VerticalResponse Adds Slew of New Features
VerticalResponse, Inc., just released a series of new tracking and reporting tools. Easy-to-view graphs and charts give small businesses the ability to see the success of various campaigns in a quick dashboard view or to dive deep into their data. The new features work to allow e-commerce business owners to refine campaigns and lists, to help maximize their marketing budgets, according to the company.
VerticalResponse's new features help marketers analyze each aspect of various campaigns. Customers can get a view into which lists are most productive, which links generate the most traffic, how subject lines perform — and can easily share their findings with their staff, according to the company.
New features include:
Reporting Dashboard: provides a quick executive summary in a single view, accessible from anywhere. In a few minutes, you can see:
- Overall Performance — Opens, Clicks, Bounces and Unsubscribes are shown both in numbers and percentages, along with Forwards, Conversions, Sales and Non-Responders.
- Top Performing Lists — For campaigns with multiple mailing lists, the dashboard provides a view of response rates for each individual list to see how they performed.
- Top Performing Links — The top five most clicked links from each e-mail are listed in the dashboard, while Detailed Reporting (details below) expands on the data.
- Recent E-mail Comparisons — This feature gives historical record of campaigns, granting an easy view of campaign trends that may increase response rates.
- Printable Dashboard — Response data can now be printed and shared with co-workers, colleagues or clients.
Detailed Reports: let marketers drill down into each campaign to analyze what's driving the statistics highlighted on the Campaign Dashboard. The levels of analysis include:
- Click-Through Performance — Customers have always enjoyed viewing the total number of clicks and click-through percentages for all the links within an email. Users now can filter this data to display by HTML, Text, and total clicks vs. unique clicks for a simple way to see which links are working.
- Compare Campaigns — Users can now choose up to five sent campaigns from any time period and evaluate the performance, with data viewed over a specific period of time (i.e. first 24 hours) or in summary totals for Opens, Clicks, Bounces and Unsubscribes.
VerticalResponse customers still have access to existing tracking features such as Domain Tracking, a Download Center for easy downloads of their data as well as tracking 'after the click' features such as Click to Conversion Tracking, Return on Investment (ROI) Tracking and tracking using the Google Analytics Integration.
In the past couple of years, VerticalResponse has shifted its development platform to allow greater flexibility and quicker turnaround, and as a result has added dozens of product upgrades a year, according to the company. This latest release helps VerticalResponse customers to better take advantage of other features recently added, from List Segmentation to Surveys.
VerticalResponse offers two pricing tiers. For example, the pay-as-you-go pricing structure works best for less frequent mailing, while the new, low-priced pay-per-month structure allows unlimited e-mail for those who find mailing their lists more often works best.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com
