Blog

This Valentine’s Day, it’s time to share the love with your customers– and increase your email marketing sales.

The numbers are in: Online retailers sold nearly $50 billion worth of goods to U.S. consumers in the fourth quarter of 2011, comScore says, a 14% increase. Online retail sales increased 13% for the full year.  

So what better day to share the love with your customers and start the new year off with a blast than a great Valentine’s Day email marketing campaign? Here are some tips to increase customer engagement, reward - and sow the seeds of - loyalty, and make compelling Valentine’s offers.

Review and Segment your Customer Lists

You’ve now got a full year of purchase history under your belt, topped off with holiday shopping data.  Valentine’s Day is your first big email marketing opportunity – and test – to leverage that data and send more relevant emails to your customer base.

Sort recipients based on the products you intend to market. For V-Day, keep it simple: men and women, then old and new customers if you have a loyalty program.  Note that men spend twice as much as women on V-Day, according to the National Retail Federation. Gift cards and date ideas are great messages to send to the men on your list.

Set the Mood

Remind your customers that the big day is coming with great Valentine’s Day headers. Use images and fewer words: Spice up your emails with hearts, roses, kisses.  Get them in the Valentine’s Day buying spirit with playful humor, like “Top ten ways to tell someone you love them” - using your products.

On Valentine’s Day, content and tone are critical – and the only way to get that right is with clearly defined segments. Don’t peddle Brazilian waxes to guys or straight-razor shaves to ladies.  A playful, funny approach that puts guys at ease falls flat with women, who generally prefer sincerity – especially on Valentine’s Day! 

If you want to tackle advanced segmentation, or have a large national list, think location-specific.  While shoppers in the Carolinas are enjoying an unusually warm winter – and a feisty flu season! - folks in the Northeast might still be shoveling snow.  Can you segment by state, and send a “Feeling stir crazy? Warm up the house” emails to the Northerners, vs “Spring’s coming early! Great ideas for your honey bunny” down South?

Windsor Circle specializes in analyzing customer data often locked in your eCommerce and shopping cart software, to generate customer lists based on purchase history and location data, and automatically populate these segments into your email marketing software.  We help cupid’s arrows hit the bulls eye.

Valentine’s Email Campaigns Start in January

Digital marketer Oneupweb reported top online sales in 2010 were February 5-6.  Starting you Valentine’s Day email campaign a month out isn't too early. Sending a week out is peak.  

There are advantages to emailing customers early before they spend their money elsewhere.  Send one email per week, and in the final week remind customers that there are only 7 days left to buy. Create a sense of urgency- but ease their anxiety by offering free shipping and guaranteed delivery before the 14th.

Make It Easy with Product Recommendations & Gift Cards

Some people give Valentine’s Day gifts to friends, coworkers, or family members. While a gift card may not be personal enough for couples, it is a great option for others. And don’t hesitate to suggest products based on purchase history and customer tastes: If someone has purchased pet items, remind them not to forget Spot.  If they bought winter sports goods over the holidays, suggest a ski trip for two.

• You can differentiate your local business from national competitors by offering delivery as late as possible near or on Valentines.
• If you are using a deal-of-the-day merchant, such as Groupon, LivingSocial or Gilt Groupe, you can email your own customer list to let them know about the deal.  And make sure to send thank-you to everyone that bought a coupon.

Use the Holiday to Show Customer Appreciation

Send a special Valentine’s email to show you “heart” them too. Express appreciation for their past business with a special discount to your best customers.   

This Valentine’s Day, contact your customers early, send them creative and targeted offers, and share the love with your loyal customers. And sit back and enjoy an early boost to your new year’s revenue with sweet Valentine’s Day profits.

We're thrilled to be among Email Insider's 9 Email-Related Companies To Watch In 2012. 

Writer Morgan Stewart, CEO of Trendline Interactive, says of Windsor Circle: "Email is all about sending the right message to the right person at the right time, right? Windsor Circle integrates with your ESP to create segments based on behavioral data. The company collects purchase history data, builds segments, and then uploads the data back into your ESP. While this type of behavioral segmentation is something we have been talking about for years, few are doing it, because it’s always been damn hard to implement. Windsor Circle makes it much easier by doing the heavy lifting for you."

We're excited to be noticed by Morgan, whose company provides service to 2 Windsor Circle clients - and we're glad that our eCommerce to Email integration solution is making the cut!

• 8 Seconds is a platform for real-time optimization of subject lines and images within your email.
• BriteVerify, which generated code to put on your registration form to get immediate confirmation that email address entered is, in fact, mailable.
• GroupVine makes it possible to include surveys in email and show the real-time results in the email.
• LiveIntent is an online trading desk where publishers can sell ad space within their emails to advertisers, and advertisers can list their ad inventory.
• Connection Engine helps you learn more about your email subscriber base, including where they live and their interests.
• RapLeaf serves email marketers by providing access to data to personalize email marketing messages for factors such as age, gender, and income.
• RevTrax is an online coupon engine with a variety of fraud protection safeguards supporting mobile and social media.
• SeeWhy addresses the problem of shopping cart abandonment with tools that help track and re-engage the 7 of 10 abandoned shopping carts in real time through Email, Facebook and Twitter.

We're as excited as Morgan about the growing innovation in email-related software - the companies above are illustrative of the growing market desire for greater sophistication in email marketing, intelligence, and segmentation.  Windsor Circle provides the integration between eCommerce platforms, including Magento, Channel Advisor, AspDotNetStorefront, and 3dcart, and a wide variety of email marketing systems.

Landing pages are one of the most important elements of modern lead generation.  A landing page can capture leads at a much higher rate than your homepage by providing a specific offer, clear calls to action, limited navigation, a simple form, and an instant win for the visitor. Windsor Circle offers Six Best Practices to launch highly effective landing pages.

In this special holiday eBook, we’ll show you how to use 5 quick and powerful techniques, each taking about an hour each, to double and triple your email marketing revenue in the holiday season.  Our e-book contains examples of great content for each technique.

In preparation for the holidays, Windsor Circle customers are deploying a beautiful and powerful email marketing campaigns to entice consumers to buy. If you do it right, you might even match GolfEtail, who had nearly 3x paying customers from emails sent out to a subset of Left-handed golfers which Windsor Circle was able to build automatically by analyzing products purchased.

Instead of holding a boring corporate luncheon this year, the Windsor Circle team decided to hold a Texas Hold'em Tournament, with a twist. Gambling would, of course, be illegal, so the prizes were selected from these acts of indentured servitude.  Find out who made who lunch!

Here we offer some email marketing tips based on an email we received after placing an order on Neiman Marcus' clearance web site LastCall.com. The email came with a special offer of a coupon code for free shipping on the next order of any amount. Neiman Marcus must not utilizing their customer purchase history data in the emails very well, or they would have noticed that we already used that exact same code when placing the order.  Learn what Neiman Marcus did wrong, and how you can do better.

Windsor Circle recently completed a survey of 250 ecommerce companies using the AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce Platform to learn more about their email marketing techniques, goals, and tools. Here are a few interesting points:

• There are at least 42 different email marketing platforms in use by the 250 retailers.
• Only 11% are "Extremely Satisfied" with their email marketing ROI.
• Abandoned Cart Campaigns, Automated Cross/Up Sell Campaigns, and Triggered Product Recommendations are considered the most effective techniques.

We've shortened down the 1 hour webinar given last week to this digestible 9 minute version. You'll see highlights from the survey data, as well as ideas on how to execute the most popular email campaigns.

ChannelAdvisor, a global e-commerce platform provider that enables retailers to sell more across online channels, today announced a partnership with Windsor Circle to provide purchase history email integration for ChannelAdvisor Webstores customers.  ChannelAdvisor Webstores customers can now add targeted email marketing capabilities instantly, allowing them to recover abandoned shopping carts, send product recommendations and segment customers based on buying behavior and purchase history.