MindComet

Length of Sales Promotions

Im not going to comment on Pet Supermarket’s email template and the best practices they are missing out on, as that’s not what this post is about.  This post is actually going to tell you how their email, sample shown below, is driving me to convert.

When I first received the email promotion from Pet Supermarket, I laughed at the subject line, “Breaking News!!! Sale at Pet Supermarket!!!“.  From this point I knew I wanted to write a post on this email however didn’t know what it was going to be about until today.  eMarketer published an article today titled, The Powerful Potential of Permission-Based E-Mail with a chart on ‘Attitude of US E-Mail Users Toward E-Mail Sent by Companies, 2005’ & 2008, shown below.

The first attitude, ‘I like receiving e-mail from companies I’ve registered with; even if I don’t always read it, it’s good to know it will be there when I’m ready for it’ is what got me to thinking about promotional emails.  So often, I see marketers, retail in particular, use time based communications to persuade customers to shop now.  What Im finding personally is that when I receive these communications, is that they are not relevant to me at the time and when they are, the promotional period has ended.

With that, I went back to Pet Supermarket’s email and saw that they had it all right.  In reading their subject line, “Breaking News…“ I thought any sale they were promoting in the email would have already passed but it turned out the sale is still going on (3 weeks duration).  This got me to reviewing the content of the email.  Sure enough, as I scrolled down, the brand of dog food I buy for my pet (lab/retriever puppy named Fenway) has a promotion running where if I purhcase a bag of dog food, I get a bag of dog treats for free.  Hadn’t I known about this promotion through email, I would have gone to the store, bypassed the weekly store flyer, grabbed the dog food I needed and be on my way but now my puppy will be going home with puppy treats too.

It’s clear from the eMarketer study that email users are saving communications for when they are relevant to them.  With that, until more email marketers start sending more relevant, targeted communications, they must give their customers a reason to come back.

Note - I used the spelling of ‘email’ as ‘E-mail’ when referencing eMarketer.  Don’t they know there’s no capitalization or hyphen?

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 24, 2009

Credit is Owed to Industry Thought Leaders

I just got back into the office today after visiting clients and had to face the overwhelming response of emails waiting for me in my inbox, which was a just two days worth in this case.  So as many do I first scanned to check for any client emails that needed direct attention, followed by internal communications.  To get through the rest, its mostly hitting the delete button because I know Im not going to go back and read through them all as there’s just not enough time in the day.  However in filtering through the journals and thought leaders blog posts which I have feed into my inbox, Im taking the time to read the blog posts yet hardly skimming the news journals article titles.  My attention to these reiterated the importance of good content and what respected contributors in this space provide for free.  Considering their busy schedules and how they still make time to post valuable information that’s read worthy, email marketers should strive do the same in publishing consistent and relevant content.  With that marketers can only expect to see their customers spending more time in their inboxes or better yet, clicking through.

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Posted by MindComet on Oct. 28, 2008