If you’re involved in e-mail marketing in any way, then the latest E-mail Marketing Metrics report from Silverpop is well worth a read.
It lists the averages for the key e-mail marketing metrics – open rates, click-through rates etc – while also looking at how they differ in the US, the UK and Germany. The averages for the UK were:
Unique open [...]
Back in the autumn, I placed orders on 137 UK online stores. On many of them I had to give a date of birth during the registration process.
So how come yesterday I only received birthday e-mails from 5 retailers – Next, Ebuyer, Avon, Barratts, and Pharmacy2u? It’s an improvement on last year, when I only received 3 birthday e-mails from online [...]
It’s 12 February and I just received an e-mail from Screwfix with the subject line ‘Nothing says I love you more than a pink drill’. Once again I find myself wondering how many relationships might fail this weekend thanks to online marketing.
But it got me looking through my other e-mails to see what else I had been [...]
This made us laugh on a cold and miserable morning – TK Maxx have come up with a viral marketing idea, where women are encouraged to upload a photo of their husband or partner and see them come to life as a catwalk model.
We put it to the test using our very own Snow Valley action [...]
The Next sale always causes a big stir on the high street, with people getting up ridiculously early to grab the bargains.
This year they’re doing something similar on the web. I received an e-mail this morning telling me that the online sale starts on 26 December, but as a valued customer I qualify for early access on 23 [...]
I noticed a nice idea on www.allposters.com today. I arrived on the site from a Google pay-per-click ad. Two seconds after I landed on the product page, a box slid slowly down from the top navigation bar offering me 20% off:
It hung there for a few seconds and then it decreased in size and slid horizontally across the page. [...]
This is a very simple but quite effective idea that I have noticed on a handful of retail sites this festive season. Instead of just having ‘gifts for him’, one or two sites have used personas to create lists of Christmas ideas to help inspire customers.
So Urban Outfitters (see first image below) has created a list of Staff [...]
I notice that advent calendars seem to be back in fashion with online retailers this year – I’ve given four examples below but I am sure there are others.
I can certainly see the appeal - as a concept, an advent calendar is perfect for getting customers to come back to your website regularly during December. However, I’m always a bit disappointed [...]
30 shopping days to go and we’re starting to see retailers really ramping up their online marketing activities.
My favourite so far is Amazon in the US. They’ve added a promotions carousel to their site ready for Black Friday. This offers huge discounts on various products, but for a limited time only or until stocks run [...]
Last week I wrote a post about product reviews. We looked at whether online retailers actively contact a customer post-purchase to ask them to submit feedback on the item that they had bought. This was based on the fact that only 15 retailers had e-mailed us to ask for comments on a product after we had placed 137 orders back in September [...]