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Introduction
The months running up to Christmas are notoriously the busiest time of year for retailers, both on and offline. In spite of the economic climate in recent years, the UK e-retail market is currently growing at 18% per year, with over 37 million people shopping online in the UK every year (IMRG). This whitepaper will outline consumer Christmas shopping trends, following a recent survey of a random sample of 1000 consumers.
Taking these consumer shopping trends into consideration, we’ve compiled some top tips for retailers in a practical guide to refining and leveraging email marketing programmes in the run up to the Christmas period.
Summary of Research
Christmas shopping – when and where?
This Christmas whilst consumers aren’t abandoning the high street, they’re increasing their activity on ecommerce shopping sites. Interestingly there’s a slight drop (9%) in respondents who bought online from the website of a high street store – and a 29% jump from 2010 in the number of shoppers to pure ecommerce shopping site.
The rise of mobile shopping is also apparent with 15% of respondents citing they will shop on a mobile device or app this Christmas. A recent IMRG report confirms this trend, with 49% of people planning to browse or purchase Christmas gifts via a mobile app.
With timing and frequency of shopping sessions on the run-up to Christmas, the good news for retailers is that a large amount of consumers only start their Christmas shopping a month before the big day.
Etailers need to ensure that they are clear on their websites about their last delivery dates so as not to disappoint any very last minute shoppers. That said, it’s important that retailers don’t miss a trick with the consumers who do shop earlier than December, implementing Christmas promotions and offers in time for those price savvy consumers who start shopping early to spread the cost over a period of months.
There is also a growing amount of people who shop on or after Christmas day, with just over 20% buying their Christmas gifts in the post-Christmas sales.
Christmas spending
Christmas 2011 will see nearly half (49%) of respondents spending the same amount as Christmas 2010, and only 21% will decrease their spending. Positively, nearly a third of respondents will spend more this Christmas, a great plus for the retail industry and especially etailers.
Consumers are spending online rather than the high street for varied reasons – the most prevalent especially at Christmas is to avoid crowds – with over two-thirds of respondents citing this. In close second, both ease and lower prices encourage people to shop online. It’s important for the secondary reasons people are likely to shop online to be noted by etailers – with discount vouchers and delivery discounts proving as popular as ever, with nearly half of respondents citing these.
The IMRG recently released statistics that showed 48% of consumers can be influenced by a retailers deals and promotions.
With the discount vouchers and codes market booming, having increased by at least 20% from 2010, these are always an added bonus for retailers to drive additional traffic to their stores/websites over the festive period.
Consumers get their hands on vouchers and discount codes in a number of ways – the most popular being online methods; through emails (44%) both directly from retailers themselves, voucher portals and group buying sites, and secondly from websites (30%). Offline methods proved less popular, with just 21% of respondents picking up vouchers/discounts in store and only 5% from newspapers of magazines.
Christmas surfing
Once the checkouts stop ringing on Christmas eve, the internet doesn’t sleep - a staggering 88% of recipients said they will be online over the Christmas period, with 86% citing checking their emails is their top priority. Browsing (71%) and buying online (74%) are a close second, with Facebook (65%) and social networks also very popular.
Once the checkouts stop ringing on Christmas eve, the internet doesn’t sleep - a staggering 88% of recipients said they will be online over the Christmas period, with 86% citing checking their emails is their top priority. Browsing (71%) and buying online (74%) are a close second, with Facebook (65%) and social networks also very popular.
According to eDigital Research, Christmas 2010 saw 86% of UK consumers logged onto the internet over Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and 22% accessing the internet on mobile phones.
Most recipients use multiple devices for using the internet, with smart phone and tablet use a growing for online shopping, but most notable for using social networks, with 65% of respondents using Smartphones and 44% using tablets for accessing social networks.
The Christmas Inbox
The savvy internet consumer will generally expect to receive more email around the festive period, but are the emails received still spray & pray, or are marketers using the segmentation tools at their disposal from their ESP to give the consumer a well thought out, targeted and specific email campaign?
When looking at email volumes, over half of recipients did cite receiving a lot more email on the run up to Christmas, and just over one-third saying this was too much.
Nearly 60% stated that the content was still fairly generic rather than specifically relevant to them – with over half of respondents also saying there was little or no personalisation to the emails.
The most positive feedback from respondents on factors they do like to see in Christmas emails is the ability to share the content with friends (71%) and discounts/vouchers to use online (65%).
The most positive feedback from respondents on factors they do like to see in Christmas emails is the ability to share the content with friends (71%) and discounts/vouchers to use online (65%).
Christmas Email Marketing Advice
In line with the trends we’re seeing from consumers, we’ve outlined some practical tips and advice for online organisations. Leveraging knowledge from the industry and your own internal information, you will be able to make 2011 the best festive period yet.
1. Lessons from Christmas past
To get the most from your 2011 programmes, reviewing all aspects of last years activity will stand you in good stead for a more successful year.
2010 Analysis
Questions to ask yourself:
o Looking at all aspects of your online and email strategy to see what worked and didn’t
work last year.
o Make the negatives into this year’s success; incorporate learning's into this year’s
strategy and tactics.
o How were customers behaving on your website this time last year? And how were they
interacting with your email programmes?
o Which promotional offers worked the best on the website and through email
programmes?
o Which product lines performed better/worse than others? What were your top sellers?
Across which channels?
o Has the competitive landscape for your business changed in the last 12 months? Are
you aware of what online strategies/programmes your competitors are implementing?
Which marketing tactics have you tried & tested in previous years?
o Campaigns with gift suggestions
o Communicated urgency and catered to last-minute shoppers
o Sent a Christmas e-card to customers
o Promoted gift-card redemption
o Offered more purchasing options
o ‘12 deals of Christmas’ messaging
o ‘Advent calendar’ countdown messaging
o Exclusive January sales preview alerts
o Being clear about last order/delivery dates
o Offered a value-add gift wrapping service
2. Strategy for Christmas present
Ensure you’re aware and fully utilise the key dates for your business and for your customers - plan out your messaging and email strategy in a calendar. Don’t forget…
Cyber Monday 28th November – the busiest online Christmas shopping day
Multi-channel retailer? – late night opening hours, discount days, catalogues, DM – inform your
customer base quickly by email
24th December – might be too late for online ordering, but try to drive footfall into stores
Christmas day – traffic to websites will increase, whether for shopping or browsing. Consumers will also be checking their emails and social networks on various devices.
Boxing day – inform customers through targeted email communications of your best offers,
stock clearances and time-limited offers to take advantage of the increased online traffic.
27th December & beyond – post-Christmas & Q1/January offers and new product lines should be launched to take advantage of the high exposure and reach.
Send variations of your emails to different customer groups/demographics to test results.
Don’t go crazy with testing at this crucial time, but test a few variables of your email campaigns
to ensure you can make changes/tweaks and achieve better response rates.
Subject line testing – are you achieving cut through in busy Christmas inboxes? Try to be
creative and watch out for overuse of spammy words.
Ensure your emails render correctly in all devices, before you press send.
Creative
Current templates – look at refreshing the design and messaging of your regular newsletter and promotional templates. Don’t forget your transactional email templates too, they’re going to be used a lot during the festive shopping season!
New creative – try to be creative and fresh to achieve stand out in the inbox - be careful with
HTML coding and image/text ratio.
Call to action – use more than just ‘buy it now’ messaging. Try to make it as easy as possible for your customer to see where to click through, ensure links are correct and that pricing and messaging is mirrored from email to website.
Promotions - budgets are still tight so where you can, use vouchers, discount codes and special offers across all online channels to drive traffic back to the website.
Subject line – use your previous learnings from all year round campaigns and testing to highlight your unique proposition, whether that’s products, services or promotions.
Segmentation & targeting
Create and test the most specific and effective segments based on previous campaigns or group of customers.
Leverage your customer data to produce the highest response rates, using data driven content in email campaigns.
Who are your customers buying for – themselves, family, friends? Use this behavioural data
collected in behavioural link categories to target recipients more specifically.
Preference centres
Use location, gender, age, purchase history, profile preferences and web site behaviour
to give your recipients the content they want to receive
Automation
Using trigger-based messages based on behavioural data will cut down your internal resources
Utilise your email marketing software tools to plan and link campaigns, to become fully
automated in responding to all possible recipient behaviours.
Use subscriber behaviour to deliver targeted product recommendations
Track website traffic and use this to shape the timings of your campaigns
Analyse performance tracking to create relevant product offers and maintain consumer
relationships.
Leverage abandoned shopping cart data to implement re-marketing messaging and targeting.
Transactional opportunities – don’t forget to include up/cross sell messaging in your
transactional programmes, to leverage the high open rates.
Deliverability & data
Deliverability
Over 90% of emails sent are spam and ISP’s block millions of emails every day – ensure
you know which ISPs you need to be aware of from your list, and keep up-to-date with
any changes they’ve made.
Your email marketing provider can give you best practice advice for your specific
industry and campaigns.
Using a delivery tool can help you monitor your deliverability and keep on top of any
issues
Ensuring that your emails are as targeted and specific as possible will help response
rates, and therefore deliverability rates across all ISPs.
Mailing list
Take advantage of the increased traffic across your website and social channels to grow
your list at this busy time.
Improve the way you collect email addresses – add sign up forms to your microsites,
landing pages and social channels.
Data hygiene is key to deliverability during peak sending times!
Outside email
• Is your website ready for Christmas? Ensure that multi-channel messaging and creative is
reflected on your website – and most importantly that your website can handle the additional
traffic!
• Using a seasonal campaign microsite or landing pages can complement your seasonal emails without having to make major changes to the creative and messaging of your main site.
• Have you amended and refreshed your keywords and call to actions in your paid search? Make sure you don’t forget to update and optimise onsite keywords in any new webpages and seasonal landing pages
• Are your social channels reflecting the same messaging as your emails?
• If you’re a multi-channel retailer, ensure you work with all other channels (in-store, catalogue, DM, call-centre etc) to utilise and harmonise messaging and creative. Ensure each channel is co-promoting, especially if you have exclusive products or promotions on one channel.
3. Ideas for Christmas future
Christmas 2011 will be over before you know it, and it’s important to make sure you’re prepared for both the year ahead and fourth quarter 2012 – taking lessons learned over these next few months.
Reporting
Measure everything! Using professional email marketing software will allow you to analyse a full set of campaign results post-Christmas.
Tracking and analysing your open rates, click rates, open to click ratios, conversion and
deliverability rates against your sales figures will enable you to present a positive set of ROI
reports back to the business.
These results will be crucial in future planning, for all seasonal or promotional periods, not just Christmas.
Ensure all your 2011 plans have been documented so you’re not starting from scratch next year.
Multiple devices
With the huge growth in the smartphone and tablet market, and consumers using multiple
devices for accessing the internet, it’s important that all areas of your communications are
geared up for this shift in technology.
For email marketing, you need to do your research – ensure you’ve got your mobile audience in mind when looking at creative, design and messaging.
Social media
Integrating social media fully into your marketing mix will become continually important. With
Facebook alone accounting for more than 53% of internet visits so far in 2011 (Hitwise).
Don’t miss out - 83% of companies expect their social media spending to increase over the next year (eConsultancy). And businesses use of social networks as a channel is on the rise with 71% using Facebook and 51% using Twitter by 2012 (MediaBistro).
Word of mouth is free - 28% people recommend products to friends via email and 75% of
people said their choice of retailer was influenced by what they read on social media sites,
(Tealeaf).
Include a sign up link in all your external communications - emails, email signatures, offline
marketing material to continually build your following.
Make sure your email contains something worth sharing and ensure that each content area is linked separately, to maximise your social sharing response rates, Most users who will click, do so within 2 minutes of content being shared (Clearspring Technologies).