As email has become more competitive and customers have taken to a variety of communication paths, most notably social in 2011, sends have become much more individualized with companies in the same category and channel sending very different offer types and frequencies.

Looking at the overall trend, it appears volume is up, likely as companies continue to strengthen their digital competency as well as the size of their offers.

The Volume Counts:

• Brookstone – 114
• Restoration Hardware – 55
• Bath & Body Works – 54
• Macys – 42 [includes sub brands, i.e. rewards]
• Harry & David – 41
• Victoria’s Secret – 42
• Zales – 42
• Ice.com – 39
• CircuitCity.com – 38
• Eddie Bauer – 37
• NewEgg – 34
• Pottery Barn – 32
• NFL Shop – 31
• Sports Chalet – 28
• Best Buy – 29
• Costco – 27
• Target.com – 24
• Bed, Bath & Beyond – 23
• HP – 22
• BananaRepublic – 21
• Dockers – 21
• The North Face – 18
• Zappos – 15
• See’s Candy – 15
• SiriusXM Radio – 12
• StarbucksStore.com – 11
• Quicksilver – 7
• The Art of Shaving – 7
• Mophie – 6

The misses & future opportunities:

1. Many companies repeated messages, offers and creative. While emails do go missed, trends become notable and as shoppers key in, response is reduced. By diversifying messaging points, even with the same baseline offer, activity increases to see what “different”.

Restoration Hardware is just one example having sent 4 identical titled emails in 1 day.

2. Significant oversending continues to be a wide-spread problem with Brookstone setting the bar at 114 emails in around 90 days. While more volume can drive short term sales, finding a balance helps insure list quality and continued usage throughout the season and minimum opt-out requests.

3. Only a few companies addressed mobile viewing. With the huge spike in mobile this year, the implications of being accessible are significant — increased awareness and offer usage for retail and being a direct alternative for etailers.

Harry & David and Best Buy offered a mobile links on messages improving their shot at converting shoppers on the go.

4. Almost no companies leveraged social to validate messages. By including user generated content such as user reviews, comments from other shoppers, or more abstract programs like gift tips, social can help email become more authentic and lessen the spammy nature of offer only messages.

Samsung keyed in to both reviews and Facebook chatter in one of their email sends.

Note about the data: I track emails starting in September that mention holidays through to new years. Messages are sent to a dedicated account and regularly opened to fire tracking tags but are not acted on [no purchases] to avoid segmentation changes and of course some messages do get lost in the mix, this is not scientific.

Last week I put up an article about ways to get your brand into user generated content and social networking websites in which I mentioned that if you aren’t willing to move fast, you shouldn’t move at all. This morning’s release by EA of a Scrabble Game on FaceBook serves as a great example of just why you have to be ready, willing and able to move quicker than quick to play in the current market.

So EA released scrabble, what’s the big deal? The deal is there’s been a scrabble “knock off” (Scrabulous) for over a year on Facebook with more than 450,000 daily users (putting it in the top 10 apps on FaceBook). Now the official version could potentially have a better feature set, interface or just plain work better but Scrabulous is a huge success and knocking it off it’s block would be just about impossible short of getting it legally removed (which has a whole set of brand implications). EA may very well see traction and pick up with its game, but let’s be honest, when something has over 10% of a network using it daily EA would have to have something many times better to get even a moderate drop off from one to the other.

On the flip side, had EA, Hasbro games or anyone else involved in the official scrabble game made a move earlier to develop their own game or strike up a partnership/ buyout of Scrabulous, all bets would have been off. Suing an app into oblivion can certainly get the dice reset but at what cost to the brand and it’s long term reputation?

However, while this topic has been covered six ways to sunday with just about the same analysis everywhere, I do see a potential move for EA here — get their app working really, really well in the mobile world. We’ve got the iphone, the iphone knock offs, smart phones and later this week (can’t wait) the new iphone. There’s a big door opening to getting more games working on mobile devices so if EA can spin out that way they still won’t get huge numbers immediately and are unlikely to ever unseat Scrabulous but for the networks with strong mobile adoption, it’s a pretty compeling arguement to be able to post & play from anywhere your phone works. Having a better offering almost always gives you a play, how big of one, well… let’s just say the real moral of the story here is to move fast or pay the price, and I don’t see any technology, branding or advertising changing that.

That all said, whose up for a game (with either app).

I spent the better part of today flying around the country; 3 flights, something like 6,000 miles, 7 free sodas and a whole lot of pretzel packs (and of course the first leg was the only one with a power adapter in the sat… but I digress). In any event, something struck me on these flights; if at 35,000 feet airlines are promoting their web & mobile offerings, where else are there opportunities to promote ours that we’re missing now because they feel “offline”?
Before I dive into that question, let me briefly walk through the two examples to get you a sense of what I mean and offer up some very distinct promotion campaigns that are being run over the same campaign.
My first flight was a short hop from La Guardia to Boston on US Airways and prompted this post when my beverage arrived. I’ve probably had thousands of drinks on airlines and often notice the napkins but only today did it really hit me. Printed on their napkin was a simple promotion – send a text message with your name, email and a few other details and they’d enroll you in the program and spit back a confirmation text with your mileage number. Talk about a great use of the latest technology. No need to go home, no need to be online. No need to leave the airport. Just fire up the pda or basic phone and shoot off a text and you’re set. Quick, easy and so simple that while US Airways isn’t someone I fly with often, it was just too easy to pass up. So now I’m a member.
The takeaway: if you want to get people enrolled in your programs figure out where they experience your brand. There’s no internet available at 30,000 (well there was and there will likely be again soon, but not today that I’m aware of) and while there’s no cell signals this high either, there are tons of cell phones available and text messages can queue up. Every minute and/ or step you cut out of the process increases the number of people who make it through the funnel.
My second and third flights were both on United who used the same tactic but with a different message and technology. Lately United’s been pushing to get more customer feedback… given their financial state who knows how actionable that information is, but hey, I commend any company for being proactive about driving in customer feedback and rewarding people for it. So with this in mind it didn’t come as much of a surprise that their napkins promote an online survey. To take things even further, the in-flight magazine and even the tickets also promote the same survey. The survey’s been running for some time now so I was familiar with it already but for new fliers, the exposure is great – so great that I heard a few other passengers mention it. Now obviously this campaign is more delayed than the US Airways offering and down the road it would be great to see United encouraging instant feedback from people post flight so they can get a handle on issues in real time and of course from more people.
My 30-second idea: Get people to opt in for post flight text invites; those with smart phones get a little multi-choice web survey, those without get a question or two via text message. Nothing fancy, nothing long, just a basic “rate the flight” for text users and a couple of following “rate the timeliness, rate the service, rate the seats” type questions. Flow that back to both the marketing and operations groups in real-time tied with flight numbers and you can find trouble spots that day, not a month later.
The takeaway: Don’t miss an opportunity to get a message in front of people even if they can’t act immediately. It takes a lot of impressions to create recall so why not one more, and with a napkin you’re almost certain to hit the majority of your customer base with something most of them will see.
So I know I had posed a question initially and although I really just intended to blog about the experience, I should probably address it. What the napkin campaigns should really show is that if you have customers interacting offline, there are still online implications that go beyond sticking your url on a business card or 3-fold flier. I really like the US Airways campaign because it’s damn near immediate but in a store it could truly be immediate. And of course it’s practical to thousands of companies… grocery stores could drop the silly rewards cards form in favor of this sort of system (how many people really prefer to keep the card vs using their phone number anyways), a retail store could enroll you in web updates about a new technology product, warranty or online support system (FAQs), and a dry cleaner could shoot out a discount for subsequent visits tied into a reminder to pick up the dry cleaning (speaking of which….).
It’s unfortunate but we often have our web and brick & mortar channels so separated that it takes an act of god to transfer a customer from one to another when in reality the customer wants to use whichever channel is best for them. Airlines are not known for being nimble or quick so if they can figure out ways to link the two I’d make the assertion any business can. And when you think about it, getting people who are in your customer base back to your website can have two great ROI benefits – more engagement (leading to more sales opportunities) and reduced support/ incident load if there’s an immediate set of follow up information or survey system in place.