Buy a jacket online and pick it up in the store. Use your tablet to price a new tennis racquet. Take advantage of retail website flash sales.
Clearly this isn’t your Mom or Dad’s retail shopping environment anymore.
Nevertheless, shopping online and going to traditional brick-and-mortar stores aren’t mutually exclusive activities. In fact, 48% of U.S. shoppers who made purchases in brick-and-mortar stores said they did research online first.1 Retail marketers who are trying to reach and be found by these sophisticated consumers need to make sure that their communications with them are equally sophisticated. And today, above all, that means reaching prospects and customers with messaging that is personalized based on behavior.
How important is personalization? According to the CMO Council, more than half (54%) of U.S. and Canadian consumers would consider ending their relationship with a retailer that is not providing them with tailor-made, relevant content and offers.2 That’s a pretty strong argument for getting personal with consumers, and one of the best vehicles for doing that is email marketing.
Email remains the marketing communications channel of choice for retailers, with 58% of companies planning to increase their budgets this year, according to ExactTarget.3 About 70% of business-to-consumer marketers report that email produces a return on investment, and an additional 25% believe email will produce an ROI in time, according to MarketingSherpa.4
So how can retailers ensure that their email messages are personalized and will be viewed by their targets? Here are four best practices to follow when crafting your retail email marketing communications strategy.
1. Make sure your subject line is short and sweet.
The first thing consumers see when they receive an email is the subject line, so it better be pretty compelling if it is going to stand out in their inbox. It also needs to be concise, and the most important words should come first, since consumers are going to be viewing emails on tablets and smartphones as well as desktop and laptop computers.
That’s easier said than done, as any copywriter can tell you. Getting someone’s attention in a limited number of words is challenging for the most seasoned marketer. A best practice is to limit the subject line to six to 10 words. Interestingly enough, a recent study shows that there is such a thing as too short when it comes to subject lines. An analysis of 260 million emails revealed that subject lines between six and 10 words had a 21% open rate, and those with five or fewer words had a 16% open rate.5
2. Make sure the content is relevant before you pull the trigger.
You can craft the most catchy, compelling subject line of all time, but if the content in the email message isn’t relevant and timely, it’s unlikely to garner attention. A popular strategy among retailers is using trigger-based messaging that determines when emails should be sent out based on a shopper’s previous purchasing behavior.
A best practice for retailers when crafting email content is to include product recommendations to engage consumers as long as those recommendations are relevant to the consumer. By using powerful algorithms, retailers can access data regarding customers’ browsing and buying behaviors and then create relevant product recommendations.
3. Abandoned carts: Don’t give up the ship(ment).
For retailers, it’s an inevitable fact of life that online shoppers are going to abandon their shopping carts now and again. For that reason, your email marketing strategy should not be confined to getting prospects and customers onto your website. Just like any other shopper who happens upon your site, the ones you reel in via email marketing can suddenly abandon a shopping cart with items they intended to buy in the blink of an eye, for no apparent reason. A good strategy for dealing with abandoned carts is to engage those shoppers with reminder emails that contain an incentive to return, such as a coupon, a discount code or a free shipping offer.6
4. Mobilize your efforts across all devices.
One of the fundamental reasons that email marketing is such a powerful channel for retailers is that consumers are increasingly accessing email from mobile devices. A recent Adobe report showed that smartphone owners used their phones more to check email than to make phone calls. The report noted that tablet owners also use their devices mostly for email, and are twice as likely to use them to shop with (44%) than smartphone owners (20%). In fact, more than half (55%) of these shoppers have purchased a product using their tablets.7
Keep in mind, however, that mobile consumers generally don’t stick to one device throughout the shopping experience. For example, Google reports that 80% of mobile consumers use more than one device while browsing and buying during the holiday shopping season.8 Even more (84%) reported that they would begin shopping on one device and finish on another. Retailers need to be aware of these cross-channel tendencies and use responsive design to ensure that emails are easy to read across all devices. According to Forrester and Shop.org, most retailers (87%) have optimized mobile email, or at least plan to do so in the future.9
Contact Jacobs & Clevenger to find out how we’ve helped clients from sectors as diverse as specialty retailers to automotive marketers succeed. You can also download J&C’s free “Retail Communication Preference Study” to learn more about marketing to a worldwide community that is increasingly turning to its devices to research, share and shop.
Sources:
1. Scanalytics Blog, “Consumer Purchasing: In-Store vs Online”
2. CMO Council Report 2012
3. ExactTarget, 2014 State of Marketing Report
4. MarketingSherpa, 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Survey
5. Retention Science, “New Research Reveals Which Email Subject Lines Perform Best for Marketers”
6. Bronto and Magento, “Abandoned Cart Emails: Unexpected or Unwelcomed?”
7. Adobe, 2013 Digital Publishing Report
8. Google, “2013 Holiday Shopper Intentions”
9. Forrester Research and Shop.org, “Retailers Shifting Digital Marketing Spend to Capitalize on Growing Mobile Traffic”
Topics: CMO
