What can retailers learn from 2010's holiday email marketing promotions? That question other email marketing questions were answered during this informal discussion between Silverpop's Loren McDonald and email marketers from King Arthur Flour and Cuddledown. Attendees took away the following: - Key 2010 holiday email trends; - Some holiday email best practices (and practices to avoid); - Ideas for improvement in 2011

1. Retail Roundtable:
Retail Holiday Wrap-Up
January 14, 2011

2. Agenda
Trends
Best Practices / Tips Q&A

3. Trends and Tips

4. Key Trends
Frequency
/ Streams
Sending
Promotions Waves /
Campaigns

5. 2-3 X Frequency

6. Jan 2
Dec 25
37
emails 51
T-Day emails
To
XMAS
Nov 18
1 week before
Thanksgiving
Day

7. New Tracks Added

8. KAF: Additional Email Stream
• Introduced the end of October
– Mailed every Saturday through Christmas day
• Promotions
– Free Ship 1: Sent 11/10
– Free ship 2: Sent 12/6
– Flat rate shipping: Sent 12/13
– Parchment: Sent 11/15
• Content
– Pie recipes: Sent 11/12
– Freeze: Sent 12/10
– Candy: Sent 12/17
• Social media
– Holiday card: Sent 12/24
– Facebook album: over 150 photos added

9. A Brown Christmas

10. Sending Waves
Shipping is the Key Driver
1. Pre-Thanksgiving
2. Black Friday
3. Cyber Monday
4. “Shop Early”
5. Shipping cut offs
a. 17th-Free shipping Friday
b. Standard
c. 2-day
d. Overnight
6. Christmas/Post Christmas
7. New Years

11. Promotions
Free Shipping/Flat Rate
Friends & Family

12. Cuddledown – In Season Promotions
•Weekly special emails
•Discounts were 40-50% off retail and items
shipped for free.
•Sent to selections of customers who historically
•In season Clearance email-sent during the lull between Veteran’s Day purchase off price.
and Black Friday. •Generally we found that customers responded to
•Higher open rates and 5X higher CT rates. product in our core bedding line more than apparel
•Resent the email a week later with a free ship offer, and then a final reminder related offers.
email.
-Open rates & CT dwindled with each send
-Demand and Units sold were highest on second send.

13. KAF: Promotions
• Free Ship 1: Sent 11/10
• Free ship 2: Sent 12/6
• Flat rate shipping: Sent 12/13
• Parchment: Sent 11/15

14. Friends & Family
Friends and family offers
extended to social channels,
as well as distributed via
exclusive email subscribers

15. Deadlines & Discounts
Cyber Monday offer-
-one day only
-no restrictions
-sitewide

16. Black Friday – 1, 2, 3
Sent 11/26 5 pm
Sent 11/26, 7 am
Sent 11/27 7 am

17. Incorporate personality
Sent 11/8, 7am
Sent 11/5, 7am

18. More items qualify…
“…over 30 new items...”
• Internet Only items ship free.
• Encourages catalog customers to
come back to the Website to shop
frequently
• Benefit for choosing the online
channel.
• Message customers when new
items are added to the free ship
assortment.

19. Include Shipping Deadlines

20. KAF: Content Focus
• Pie recipes: Sent 11/12
• Freeze: Sent 12/10
• Candy: Sent 12/17

21. KAF: Social Media
• Holiday card: Sent 12/24
• Facebook album: 150+
photos added

22. Some Successes – What Worked
Cuddledown
• Black Friday through Cyber Monday promotional stream and email
frequency.
• Keep promotions easy and non-restrictive, remove hurdles.
• More diligent segmentation yields much more productive results to the
email program overall
• Free shipping offers tied to surveys-you scratch my back, I’ll scratch
yours.
• In season inventory clearance emails
• Free Shipping event for 3 days leading up to the ground cutoff as well as
the national free ship holiday
King Arthur Flour
• Product driven promotions – free shipping on parchment, $$ off vanilla
• Holiday card (KAF)

23. What Disappointed
Cuddledown
• Weekly specials only worked for some product categories-don’t veer too
far away from your existing assortment.
• List growth continues to be our biggest challenge to overcome
• Didn’t have the internal resources to fine tune all landing page strategies
to align more closely with email
• Social media integration could be even better.
• Too long of an email break between our 12/8 email till our free shipping
offers started 12/12. Need to have relevant email content for this key
period, not just promotions.
King Arthur Flour
• Friends & Family
• Cyber Monday (expected to be weak performer)

24. 2011

25. Our 2011 Holiday “Wish List”
 More segmentation
 More social integration via contests and community
 Good use of video
 Surveys-in exchange for benefits like free shipping
 More short themed surveys several times a year.
 Using more value-add content items
 Post-purchase follow-up emails for upsell and care
techniques
 Sending recipes for ingredients purchased
 Adding new email streams

26. Q & A / Contact Information
• Loren McDonald
– lmcdonald@silverpop.com
– Twitter: @LorenMcDonald
– Twitter: @Silverpop
• Tracy Taylor
– Tracy.taylor@kingarthurflour.com
– Twitter: @kingarthurflour
– Twitter: @T_TaylorKAF
• Laura Hnatow
– lhnatow@cuddledown.com
– Twitter: @Cuddledown
– Twitter: @hnatow

27. About Silverpop
• A leading email marketing /
marketing automation provider
• Transactional email system
• Landing pages
• Surveys
• SMS
• API Integrations w/ Web
analytics, personalization, reviews,
recommendation technologies

28. Resources
• Resource Center
– White papers
– Webinars
– Blogs
– Case studies
– Newsletters
– http://www.silverpop.com/marketing-resources/index.html
• Many presentations on SlideShare
– www.slideshare.net/Silverpop

29. Thank you!
On Twitter: @Silverpop
www.slideshare.net/silverpop
www.silverpop.com