Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Habeas Webinar: Multichannel Revolution
How Web 2.0 and Online Reputation Changes Strategy and Results

ad:tech New York 2007: Optimizing Email to Maximize Your Return
Trends and case studies.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

While it's a challenge we face all year long, avoiding the dreaded "garage sale" mish-mash of product photography becomes particularly difficult during the holiday season, when business requires hot but random items be featured together under various thematic umbrellas such as “for him” or "with free shipping."

Sephora, Williams-Sonoma Home, Coach (via Macy’s) and J. Crew have all effectively avoided this conundrum by photographing their gift-able wares in silhouette, thereby pulling product off the garage sale table and into the white space of possibility. To tie images together they create visual environments using graphical devices like line (Sephora), color (Williams-Sonoma Home), movement (Coach) and type (J. Crew).

This approach allows us to avoid both extra work and extra conflict: creative no longer needs to fake backgrounds to make products shot in different environments look as though they were taken at the same location; business and creative don't have to argue about which products can be tastefully featured in tandem (particularly at the last minute when one out-of-stock item needs to be replaced with another “immediately, as the campaign deploys in less than 12 hours!!!”)

Let’s allow these examples to inspire us all to do better photo planning for Holiday 2008. In short, let’s photograph absolutely everything remotely gift-able in silhouette and be done with it, then just sit around and eat peppermint bark all November and December, draped in monogrammed cashmere throws.

I can’t think of any other way to successfully feature a jewelry box next to a bowl of lemons.

Happy Thanksgiving!

As ever,
Lisa Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

From: Sephora
Subject Line: Enchanting Gifts + Shipping Offer
Date: Friday, November 2, 2007

From: Williams-Sonoma Home
Subject Line: Expanded Gift Assortment + Free Shipping on Select Gifts
Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2007

From: macys.com
Subject Line: Coach: Free Shipping on $100 or more
Date: Thursday, November 15, 2007

From: J.Crew
Subject Line: Very Merry Gifts + FREE SHIPPING
Date: Monday, November 19, 2007

Want to cruise the San Diego harbor with more than 250 of the best minds in email marketing? Then register now for the Email Evolution Conference, which is being held Feb. 12-13 at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego. The next 25 registrants will get a free ticket to join the conference speakers and sponsors on the cruise on the evening of Feb. 11 (a $199 value).

>>REGISTER TODAY

When asked in a JupiterResearch Consumer survey, just 17% of the online population cited adware as a strong concern that had impacted their use of the Internet in the last 12 months. Moreover, 15% of the online population stated that they had paid for anti-adware software, indicating that this portion of the population that is rightly concerned with ad-tracking and malicious attempts to monitor their behavior are already self-regulating this situation.

Such a do-not-track list is impractical for a number of reasons. JupiterResearch continues to find that consumers regularly clear their cache and delete cookies in order to protect their surfing behavior. Beyond that engrained behavior, the notion of computer sharing at home, work and school makes the notion of a do-not-track list a logistical nightmare. This reality coupled with the comparison to the do-not-call list that the document cites is not accurate. The Do Not Call list works particularly because of the friction involved with setting up a phone number. While difficult, a malicious advertiser could circumvent such friction by setting up a new IP address and thus such a do-not-track list is merit-less just as the failed proposal for a do-not-email list was. Malicious email senders can hide behind a new and changing array of IP addresses and the same is true for those bad actors in the online ad space.

Furthermore, such a system would undermine a significant and growing portion of the online economy that is behavioral targeting. Many technology companies—and increasingly, legitimate publishers—are using behavioral tracking to increase advertising revenue versus one ad for all.

Lastly, such a notion of a an IP-based do-not-track list would fly in the face of the FCC mandate requiring digital transmission of TV signals (coming to a set-top box in the near future). The advertiser/publisher benefit of that FCC mandate is to potentially target the IP address of a set-top box in order to deliver more meaningful and relevant ads and content. The FTC proposal is in conflict with the promise of the FCC plan and would simply raise costs and stifle the innovation of relevance.

—David Daniels of JupiterResearch

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

EmailStatCenter.com's First Annual State of Email Metrics Survey Results
345 responses were collected—approximately 55% were from the client side and 45% from agencies or ESPs.

Listrak: Dynamic Content in Action: DiscountBeautyCenter.com Case Study
Check out how to set up and test the viability of using dynamic content to generate email campaigns.

Chad White: The Forgotten Pages of Email Marketing
Some marketers seem to take a ‘set and forget’ approach to trigger emails and email forms and pages.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

The results of many a strategy session over the past few months will play out in the next 10 days as retailers launch their Black Friday email plans. Maybe some of these ideas will help you make some last-minute improvement to your own strategy:

- A number of retailers are doubling down on Monday and Tuesday by sending extra sale notices this week, so those days are going to be high-traffic days for the email backbone. Pace out your own mailings as much as possible and expect delays in delivery as the ISPs manage the volume. Keep an eye on your own program so you can course correct as needed.

- We always see that a campaign approach works better than one-off messages. Keep a consistent theme to the week and stay focused on the key buying offers. Remember, the inbox is getting much more crowded, so you have less time to make an impact.

- Friday morning may also be a good time for reminder emails. We've worked on a couple of programs that include a Saturday "Didn't find what you wanted" follow up notes to encourage offline shoppers to just stay online. The notion of Cyber Monday (a big online shopping day when folks get back to work) seems to be less prevalent this year, but may be worth including in your plan. If subscribers have a lot of email in the inbox when they come back after a long weekend, a Monday afternoon email might counter any "select all and delete" mailbox management done by consumers early in the day.

- Help your messages breakthrough by spending extra time on your subject lines. There will be lots of sales, and lots of cross channel promotions. What is unique about yours? Remember that the best subject lines are specific—clarity always trumps clever. So keep to the facts—"No one beats our prices" or "A gift for you with a gift for them."

- Create urgency by having online sales times that reflect your customers' habits—e.g., moms shop online early and late and need time-saving quick cart-building links. We have a number of clients testing a 24-hour sale on Friday or Saturday, and the email program all week is promoting that window of opportunity.

- Even if you are not a retailer, consider that there is more competition in the inbox this week and through the end of the year. Consider metering back and focus on making fewer messages more compelling. Try adjusting cadence too—like three days in a row for a particular message and theme (make sure the offer warrants the cadence) or focusing on a particularly frequency, like "Tuesday Tips."

- As always, respect the permission grant given to you. Sending more email than promised gets noticed and can be a huge turn off for subscribers. Be sure to balance your need to promote now with the very real long-term need to sustain and nurture an active file.

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

Thomas S Kraemer writes: Email is a great medium for marketing. The area that I'm trying to crack is how to get people to provide their email address with permission for us to market to them so we can reach them through this efficient medium. What are some ways you have found to get the reluctant email provider to give you his or her email address for promotional purposes?

The eec community had this advice:

Jeanniey Mullen responded: The first rule of thumb is that people need to understand what's in it for them— in return for their email and permission, what will they get? The benefits needs to be material and clearly spelled out. Some of the ways that seems to work well for many groups are: transactional or service message opt-in opportunities, direct mail postcards, call center capture and in some cases online sweepstakes or polls.

Bryan Eisenberg responded: The key to getting email address from people is to understand that you are in an exchange of value. Not only to they need to get a good sense of what the future value of your relationship will be but what will the present exchange bring to them. If you can offer some immediate benefit—a small report, ebook, or something similar—you may give them additional incentive to provide an email address. All be clear with people about the frequency and type of content they will get helps.

Matthew Gordon responded: In my experience it is also important not to ask for too much information to begin with, region, age, sex, etc. Keep it simple: Name and email address. After you have established and created a relationship of trust with the recipient can you then request further information.

Read the rest of the responses and share advice of your own by visiting the Email Experience Council’s Facebook discussion board. Other topics currently being discussed include “Rendering on BlackBerries.”

-->Read more Collective Email Wisdom.

Today the Email Experience Council announced its call for entries for its first award competition recognizing email marketing excellence—The Email Performance Award. The award will be presented to an individual or organization that has created an email marketing campaign that demonstrates the full power of the channel.

Entries will be evaluated for their marketing strategy, creative components, and, most importantly, results. Permission-based email marketing campaigns from any industry vertical — including B-to-B, B-to-C, nonprofit, education, etc.— are eligible for entry into the award competition as long as results described have been achieved within the last 12 months.

The Email Performance Award offers email marketers a unique opportunity to showcase the best-in-class strategies, design, and tactics that make them successful. We look forward to recognizing the brands that lead by example, and hope they provide inspiration to others seeking to further leverage the power of the email channel in their marketing mix.

Nominations close on Monday, Dec. 10, 2007. For more details about submission guidelines and entry forms, click here.

The members of the eec will select the winner from among the Email Performance Award finalists, which will be determined by the eec’s leadership and announced in mid-January. The winner will receive free admission to the Email Evolution Conference at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego, where the Email Performance Award will be officially presented on Feb. 13, 2008.

The winner of the Email Performance Award will also be placed into the semi-finals of the Direct Marketing Association’s International ECHO Awards. Since 1929, the ECHO Awards, which are presented each October, have recognized the world’s outstanding multichannel direct marketing campaigns based on excellence in strategy, creativity, and results.

For additional information about eec membership or the Email Performance Award, please contact Ali Swerdlow, the eec’s Marketing & Sponsorship Manager, at ali@emailexperience.org or 888.804.4521, ext. 3.

For the next two months, both Starbucks’ coffee cups and most online retail email creative will share a similar shade of red. And as Starbucks introduces this year’s holiday-themed cup sleeve, so a handful of retailers wrap their emails with holiday-themed navigation. This year Target, Amazon.com, Apple and REI all rolled out their holiday navs during the first week of November. Check out these before and after email navigation captures:

Target, Nov. 4

Amazon.com, Nov. 5

Apple, Nov. 7

REI, Nov. 9



FOUR WAYS TO DECK THE NAVS

(1) Show a Little Bit of Spirit
I know how much we all love to get in there and go crazy with the décor, but don’t get so heavy with your holiday nav that it visually overpowers your main message body. Bring in a touch of color or a playful graphic element to say: “holiday is here,” but not “and here, and here, and here …” All of the navs featured above do a good job keeping it light.

(2) Stay Non-Denominational
Red and light blue seem to be creative favorites this season; green is just too darn Christmassy, isn’t it? Apple and Amazon bring in just the right amount of generic holiday feeling with ribbon and trees; Target’s holly is super-cute but excludes folks who don’t celebrate on December 25.

(3) Add a Gift-Specific Menu Item
Be relevant and accessible to gift givers: Amazon.com, REI and Target all added a gifting menu item to their standard navigation. REI gets bonus points by using red to “make it pop”.

(4) Plan for the Un-plan-able
Anyone who’s lived through even one holiday season in retail email creative knows: despite the best-laid plans, things get cah-razy. Amazon.com and REI get all “Art of War” on that action with flexible HTML text promotional spaces at the upper right of their email creative. Include a spot that’s both front-and-center and easy-to-update to accommodate all those last-minute markdown and rush shipping upgrade messages.

Good luck!
Lisa Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

Reading Wired magazine this past weekend (insert your favorite Tricia-wants-to-be-a-nerd comment here), I ran across a new term—“Bacn” (http://bacn2.com). Coined in August at PodCamp Pittsburgh, it means permission email you opt-in for, never read, then delete. The recipient wanted the email at the time of opt-in but just can’t find the time or will to read. The email marketing world is chock full of bacn. Most email marketers would agree that bacn is the result of non-relevant email.

So I ask, in making bacn, which half of the relevance equation is broken—content or timeliness?

—Tricia Robinson-Pridemore of StrongMail

The answer…
51% --> Yes, list rental is a viable acquisition strategy.
49% --> No, the risk of hurting our sender reputation is too great.

Are you surprised by this collective wisdom? Share your thoughts below.

Also, visit the EEC homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
Is the open rate metric still useful?

-->Read more Two-Click Survey Results

Following the announcement we made on this blog last week regarding the availability of the session schedule for the Email Evolution Conference, yesterday we released a more formal version of that announcement to the media, adding some new details. For instance, the conference’s 34 sessions will include more than 85 speakers. Over the past few days we’ve updated the conference program with more of those names, which include executives from National Geographic Society, Conde Nast, American Express, Gannett Co., Allstate, Live Nation, Cisco, KeyBank and eHarmony.

We also promised that each of the 27 breakout sessions will include at least one marketer, so attendees can be sure to get real-world advice on everything from deliverability and list hygiene to acquisition and multichannel marketing.

In addition to all the educational sessions, we also announced that the conference will include an Experience Hall, with exhibits from more than 40 of the industry’s top vendors and service providers, including Message Systems, Puresend, Habeas, and the conference’s exclusive title sponsor, ExactTarget. The Experience Hall will feature special pods instead of booths, which will allow for better networking and make you feel less like a mouse in a maze of booths.

For more information or to take advantage of early bird rates, please visit http://www.emailevolution.org.

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

eMarket2: The Anatomy of an Effective HTML Email Message
It takes more than just good content to make an email effective.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Do digital marketers view the function of the email similarly to that of the outer envelope in snail mail? Essentially, intrigue folks to click to the order page (open the envelope) as quickly as possible? —J.P.

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Chip House: I think that using the simile of direct mail is helpful when trying to understand the critical components of a successful email. To answer the question directly, however, I don’t equate the email itself to the outside of the envelope. Also, I don’t believe that the sole purpose is to drive to the inside of the envelope—or to drive a click to a web page. These are both critical pieces of email, but not the complete package.

First of all, I see the outside of the envelope as the “from” address and the subject line. These items are most often seen by the end-user. Optimizing these “envelope fields” really is the most critical item to get your email opened. In the days of preview panes and image blocking, however, optimizing the top portion of your email with alt tags, HTML call-to-action copy, etc. is also necessary if you want the recipient to spend more than 3 seconds on your message.

Second, once the email is opened, certainly getting the recipient to click through to the order page quickly is the goal of many retailers. Others in publishing, or B2B marketers, may choose a more “curriculum-based” approach where they are educating via their emails, adding value and creating ongoing interest. These types of communications don’t target a quick reaction, but rather seek to create a more educated customer/subscriber—one that chooses to pick your business over your competitors’ for the long haul.

Jeanniey Mullen: This is an awesome question! For those of us in the digital space, who also have years of experience in the “old school” world of direct marketing, the similarities are quite interesting. A great example of this is what is known in the direct mail world as the “Johnson Box.” I was going to write more about what a Johnson box is, and how it relates to email—but good, old Wikipedia does a phenomenal job—so check it out here.

The Johnson Box is just one example of how traditional direct mail successes are reused in email. If I were new to email and wasn’t sure how to succeed, I would find the best direct marketer I know and take them for coffee—they could teach you a trick or two that could be applied to email and give your campaign a competitive advantage.

Chad White: While in most cases retail emails do act like the envelope for the landing page, they don’t always. For instance, Saks Fifth Avenue sends their New York subscribers an email once a month highlighting in-store events at their flagship Fifth Avenue store, and MLB.com sends subscribers reminders to tune in to playoff games. In those cases, the email is like the letter rather than the envelope. This is probably the best way to think of email when the action prompted by the email takes place offline or in another channel.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

-->Read other Reply to All posts.

In a multichannel retail business, using email to drive traffic to brick-and-mortar stores can be an interesting task. Chief challenges include:
(1) Internally, online and retail departments are often not only separate but also competitive;
(2) Generally, retail-focused campaigns don’t drive as many immediate web sales, causing email crack-cocaine withdrawal; and
(3) Actual store traffic and resulting sales can be difficult to track, yielding performance metrics that sound like this: “Wow! Tons more people came into the store that day!”

Despite the hurdles, as retailers experience at least anecdotally positive results and simultaneously improve their geo-targeting capabilities, they also grow more sophisticated in store-specific creative execution. While in-store discounts, coupons and incentives will always remain a favorite tactic, I’ve seen more brands experiment with two of my favorite C’s: content and cachet.

Below, Pottery Barn Kids, Crate & Barrel and Williams-Sonoma serve up varying degrees of virtual and physical content with Pottery Barn Kids heavy on virtual, get-psyched pre-visit tips and Williams-Sonoma listing a truly impressive breadth of in-store cooking classes and demonstrations. (This is one of the rare cases in which the events seem to exist for reasons other than to justify an email blast.) I do appreciate that Crate & Barrel has contextualized their store events by giving them a name. How cute is “Crate Ideas”?

From: Pottery Barn Kids
Subject Line: In stores now: Everything you need to celebrate the holidays.
Date: Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007

From: Crate & Barrel
Subject Line: Crate Ideas store events this weekend
Date: Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007

From: Williams-Sonoma
Subject Line: Join us for Culinary Demonstrations
Date: Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2007

Pottery Barn, PUMA Women and Ann Taylor play the cachet card, peppering their subject lines and designs with words like “exclusive,” “most-valued,” “private” and “after-hours” in the hopes that making subscribers feel special will also make them feel like getting into a car. (Did I mention “exclusive”? “Exclusive” is clearly the new “luxury.”)

Pottery Barn upped the ante by offering wine, which has been proven to increase spending by 20% per glass. Just kidding. But probably not! SPG—spend per glass. Is that a new KPI?

From: Pottery Barn
Subject Line: You're invited to an exclusive wine and cheese event
Date: Monday, Oct. 29, 2007

From: PUMA Women
Subject Line: You're invited to our After Hours Party!
Date: Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007

From: Ann Taylor
Subject Line: Hurry! Private Sale Today, Only for You
Date: Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007

As ever,
Lisa Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Flimp Media: Web Video Marketing: The Birth of a New Online Marketing Application
The meaning and benefits of interactive web video.

Listrak: The Art and Science of Email Marketing
Art is all about form and content, and like art, your emails must inspire your audience to perform your end goal.

ExactTarget: The Top Email Power Trends for 2007
A mid-year look at what's working for the winners.

DMNews: Study - DM, email blend ups spend
Integrating digital advertising with direct mail campaigns can increase customer spend by almost 25%.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

We're happy to unveil the schedule for the Email Evolution Conference, which is being held in San Diego, Feb. 12-13. This initial schedule includes speaker details on our four exciting keynotes:

1. Pete Sheinbaum, the CEO of Daily Candy, will be speaking about his company’s successes with email.
2. Jerry Cerasale of the DMA and Eileen Harrington of the FTC will discussing the state of privacy and marketing laws in the U.S. and abroad.
3. Dylan Boyd, one of the main people behind eROI’s blogs; Tamara Gielan, the author of the BeRelevant! blog; and Chad White, the author of RetailEmail.Blogspot, will be talking about our blogging efforts, why we do what we do and where we get our ideas.
4. And JupiterResearch’s David Daniels, ExactTarget’s Chip House, Microsoft’s Craig Spiezle and the eec’s Jeanniey Mullen will be…well, it’s difficult to explain. But it’s sure to be unforgettable.

Outside of the keynotes, the conference is organized into three tracks:
- Fundamental, which is geared toward the Email Deployment Manager/Coordinator;
- Intermediate, which is intended for Interactive/Direct Marketing Managers and Directors; and
- Advanced, which is for Executive Marketing/Advertising Leads and CMOs.

We’ve all been to conferences where we sat in sessions that were either totally over our heads or didn’t tell us anything new at all. The three-track format is designed to ensure that all attendees are getting information tailored to their expertise levels. As you can see from the agenda, the sessions cover a wide range of email marketing topics, from acquisition and list management to multichannel marketing and our charity work with the Women’s Bean Project. It should be very educational and a lot of fun.

We’ll be releasing more details about sessions, events and speakers in the weeks ahead. We have lots of cool things planned, so stay tuned.

Is 'customer-centric' just a concept put into practice by the early adopters...or is there a point soon where we'll see quicker adoption of real data-driven 1:1 marketing?

Is it a data/data modeling issue? Is it an analytics issue? Is it a ROI issue? Is it a content issue? Is it due to internal resource constraints? Is it due to lack of subject matter expertise? —R.E.

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Tricia Robinson-Pridemore: Customer-centric messaging is the same “behavioral” “interactive” messaging paradigm we’ve been chatting about for years. It’s being done by some F100 and Web 2.0 organizations. F100 companies are running it out of marketing and Web 2.0 companies manage it out of their technology/customer behavior/e-commerce groups. The two biggest reasons it isn’t more widely adopted are data synchronization and strategy. Customer data is all over the place in organizations. Stored in multiple databases, e-commerce systems, web analytic systems, and *still* often in flat files (a.k.a. Excel spreadsheets). To make that data useful and in any way operational, email systems need to talk to that data where it resides or marketers must synchronize and consolidate that data.

The other current spoiler for customer-centric messaging is lack of strategy. In a recent JupiterResearch survey of email marketers, the number one most important challenge they cite when working with email is “defining an email strategy.” If determining a strategy for email is tough for them imagine what making a real data-driven 1:1 marketing strategy is like? Although important, technology will only be as successful as your messaging strategy. Find the right partners who have creative, experienced experts to help build your messaging strategy and your technology implementation.

Chip House: I think we’re seeing true customer-centric communications now. Just think about the real-time, transactional messages that are driven by customer actions (buying something, signing up for something, or going somewhere). Going deeper here includes email messages triggered by information captured via web analytics data, such as product category visited, or a shopping cart abandon. Certainly there are barriers to scaling this type of customer-centric communications into some organizations and business process, but if there is a reason we don’t see broader adoption I believe it has to do more with the fact that it takes a concerted effort for marketers to actively leverage and integrate the available technologies and data to drive highly-relevant communications. In the end marketers need to spend more time with their database experts and focus on developing “one view” of the customer, and reacting to the customers’ wants and needs and behaviors. Too many marketers resign themselves to sending another weekly email focused on the “specials” highlighted in the Sunday circular.

We could really write books around this topic, so I’ll stop there. The answer is that in the world of technology, the CMO and the CIO have to start working closely together to leverage current technologies.

Chad White: In retail email marketing, I see a lot of broadcast emails. And to a certain extent that makes perfect sense—sales notifications, for instance. But there’s plenty of room for a lot more tailored communications. Offering more niche newsletters is a huge step toward 1:1 marketing. Only 28% of major online retailers offer more than one newsletter, according to the 2007 Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study. For example, Barnes & Noble offers 21 different email newsletters so people can get content and promotions about just the kinds of books and music they enjoy. Giving customers the ability to express their preferences is a relatively easy way to boost relevancy without diving into behavioral analytics, which may be beyond many retailers’ current capabilities.

While expressed preferences can get you far, to get any closer to 1:1 marketing retailers will have to rethink what they consider to be their inventory. They need to move from a product-centric view, where goods are the inventory and retailing is about finding customers that want those goods, to a customer-centric view, where customers are the inventory and retailing is about supplying the goods that your individual customers want. To do that, retailers will need to consolidate all their far-flung customer data first.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

-->Read other Reply to All posts

Greg Cangialosi is an eec member and a widely recognized expert in the digital space. When I read his recent blog post I knew I had to blog about it too (and not just because he mentions me in the post). It is right on the money—and does a great job of articulating what many of us are thinking. Thanks, Greg, for keeping the conversation alive.

—Jeanniey Mullen

Halloween is my best holiday. On Oct. 31, it's absolutely OK to do two of my favorite things: dress up and eat candy. I monitored my inbox today (in costume – I was a nun) to see which retailers were celebrating with me. The results were frightening! Out of the 42 commercial emails I received, only 3 directly referenced Halloween—that’s scarcely more than 7%. Bluefly, J. Crew and Lands' End each offered up a treat: a percentage discount, a free shipping offer and a dollar discount, respectively. (They also used eerily-similar subject lines, following a “Boo!” + “Offer” paradigm. We do have our SLs down to a science.)

From: Bluefly
Subject Line: BOO! Extra 10% Off-Today Only
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007

From: J. Crew
Subject Line: Boo! Free shipping's ending…
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007

From: Lands' End
Subject Line: Boo! A $10 Gift For You.
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007

We all talk so much about relevancy, and while many of us find technological obstacles between our email programs and that fabled state of totally targeted, segmented, dynamic-data-driven email nirvana, there is absolutely nothing stopping any of us from sharing something as simple as a batch-and-blast Halloween greeting with our subscribers. I certainly received a deluge of Halloween-focused messaging in the weeks leading up to the event—costumes, treats, décor and more, right?!

As we move into our next phase of holiday preparation—Thanksgiving—let’s consider ending our T-day-focused communication stream with an exclamation—Happy Thanksgiving! You know you’re gonna send out a Black Friday sale message anyway, so why not offer it as a gift in thanks? Check back post-turkey; I’ll report on whether the well-wishing ratio is any more bountiful.

Until next week!
Lisa Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.