During the 2013 holiday season, online and broadcast-based retailer Jewelry Television discovered a new way to drive revenue via e-mail. Like many retailers it had always sent extra promotional e-mails targeting major holiday shopping days, particularly Black Friday and Cyber Monday, says Craig Shields, vice president of e-commerce. But last year the retailer tested similar promotional e-mails on other days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, like a non-hyped Wednesday in December, and found that e-mail could generate a significant revenue bump on any of day if the message was well-crafted and well-timed, he says.

According to the September issue of Internet Retailer magazine, the results were so good, in fact, that he anticipates Jewelry Television will send different promotional e-mails on 50 to 60 days in the final two months of 2014—nearly every day in November and December. And on some of those days, a distinct promotion could include sending multiple e-mails to customers throughout the day reminding them of limited-time sales on JTV.com.

“Everyone waits for Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” Shields says. “But last year we learned: all those other Mondays and Fridays? You can be highly promotional and move the needle there too.”

Jewelry Television’s plans to build on those findings this holiday season, and it is hardly alone. Merchants large and small and across most product categories are gearing up now to prepare their e-mail marketing strategies for the holidays. And like Jewelry Television, they are looking back on what worked last season, as well as throughout the first part of this year, to choose which strategies to keep, tweak or toss. Whether they’re going with responsive web design—which adapts a web site to the visitor’s screen size—or another technique, nearly all are focused on optimizing e-mails for mobile devices.

Jewelry Television’s high-frequency e-mail success didn’t arise from simply sending more messages—though it is one of just 12 retailers in the Internet Retailer 2014 Top 500 Guide that sent more than 50 separate e-mails to a new e-mail subscriber during the 2013 holiday season. Since January, the retailer has refined its strategies, including the time of day it sends e-mails (afternoon is best) and the frequency or its message (if a customer responds to a promotion in the morning, she won’t receive a reminder in the afternoon), Shields says.

What’s inside the e-mail counts, too. “Without a good offer, just throwing an e-mail out at 4 p.m. might lead to a little [site] traffic, but otherwise it’s a waste,” he says. For Jewelry Television, which sells high-end items and charges for shipping, the offers that generate the most sales are first shipping discounts; then financing options, such as paying in three installments; and finally other limited-time sales and promotions, he says. Among Top 500 retailers, 319 offered free shipping in the 2014 holidays, with 123 typically requiring a minimum order value of $50 to receive it, according to Internet Retailer’s Top500Guide.com.

Jewelry Television has also streamlined its messages to better meet the needs of its increasingly mobile customers, Shields says. More than 50% of its customers open its e-mails on smartphones and tablets already, and that’s growing. So rather than sending one e-mail featuring three promotions as it did in the past, for example, the retailer now usually sends three separate messages, each featuring a single promotion, he says. That makes it easier for a consumer reading the e-mail on a smartphone to digest and respond to each deal.

The retailer also tests that the links in its e-mails work equally well regardless whether leading to its mobile or desktop sites—an especially pertinent consideration as Jewelry Television is in the process of moving all its e-mail templates to responsive web design. With that, a single set of code automatically adjusts which e-mail elements display and how, depending on the screen size used to open it.

For much more about holiday e-mail marketing, and the experiences of other retailers, read the September issue of Internet Retailer magazine.

 

 

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