Posted by Gareth Cutter on 21st January 2009 to
Industry and
Best Practice Christmas Day and New Year's Day are well and truly behind us now – but there's another important date coming up for email marketing: Valentine's Day. Love it or loathe it, the next national holiday is approaching and some enterprising marketers have gotten the jump on it already and started mentioning it in their marketing message copy, as shown by the latest report from the Retail Email Index.
If you're selling in a seasonal market place that traditionally sees a rise in sales around Valentine's Day, our advice is: start planning ahead. What content will be going into your emails and do you intend on increasing the frequency of emails you send out as the date approaches? If you haven't got an email marketing program already, seriously consider it, because it's a cost-effective way of getting in touch with interested customers directly and pointing them in the direction of your sales team and ecommerce site.
Although December 2008 and the Christmas run-up are a distant memory, there's still things that we can learn from them: Cyber Monday has now been established as another key date in the email marketing calendar for international retailers. This date falls on the Monday directly after “Black Friday”, the ceremonial kick-off of the Christmas shopping season in America. Cyber Monday 2008 saw online sales total $846m (£598,970,000) an increase of 15% on 2007. Shoppers have taken up these online sales with enthusiasm, as evidenced by the 15% increase but the increase in retailers sending out email marketing promotions on this day wasn't quite so large – only up 2% to 70% overall.
There's still room for more businesses to take advantage of this spike in consumer spending - so if last year is anything to go by, 2009 should a further incremental increase in retailers seeking to increase Cyber Monday spending by cutting prices on this now firmly established tradition.
