Webinar preview: Why email deserves a second look

With the all-important holiday season coming up fast, many merchants are planning to rely heavily on one of their old workhorses: email.  Email has a proven track record of success when it comes to driving eCommerce sales; it’s more effective than both social media and search marketing, according to data compiled by marketing services firm Monetate – converting at a rate of 4.16% per session, more than 50% higher than search and seven times the rate of social media.

But perhaps because it’s such an effective tool, many merchants don’t give it the time and attention it deserves. While , according to the Direct Marketing Association, just over half of merchants — 61% — said they planned to invest more in email programs in 2011 than they did in the prior year, according to industry researcher Forrester.

That’s bad news, because too few merchants are employing even basic best practices, according to Forrester. For example, just 17% of merchants scrub subscribers whose email addresses have bounced, and less than a third reported having a welcome message or program for new email subscribers. Just 6% of merchants offer shoppers a way to tailor email messaging to match the products and services they’re interested in.

Consumers have high expectations for email performance – and are apt to unsubscribe, or, worse, mark email as spam if it doesn’t meet their needs. Lack of relevance constitutes two of the top three reasons consumers unsubscribe from email, market researcher Chadwick Martin Bailey found – with fully 56% of shoppers saying they unsubscribe if the content doesn’t meet their needs, and 51% doing so if the messages don’t match their expectations.

Luckily, merchants can come closer to meeting shoppers’ expectations for email without needing to overhaul their businesses entirely; in fact, there are small changes merchants can still implement for their holiday campaigns to help achieve even more success. By making the most of data from new touchpoints like social and mobile and nudging up relevance of messaging, merchants can achieve big gains.

Tune in to tomorrow’s Webinar to get all the details, including best practices for list acquisition as well as methods for fine-tuning relevance and spurring engagement. Meantime, what email strategies are you developing for the holiday season?