Social media sites like facebook, digg and pinterest are currently rocking the stage and acquiring new users every day. Nevertheless email is still one of the most successful communication channels currently available. Everybody is using them regularly. This blog post will show you some business problems which are often overlooked.- Which subject line should I use?
- Which content article should I put in front?
- How much discount should I give?
- Do we have enough special offers in stock?
- How do I give personalized recommendations?
Subject lines
One of the most important things for a newsletter is the subject line. It should summarize the newsletter and give the user a reason to read it. It might be useful to put in some words for optimizing conversion like free or discount. Did you already check which is the most frequent opened subject for your current newsletter? Even if you do regularly A/B tests you can just test a finite amount of subjects and you will loose money in one of the test groups.
Content articles
The current way is to just use an article that the boss likes. This can also be entitled as shoot gun marketing because everyone is expected to be like the boss. Even if it is obvious that this might not be the best decision, the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) principle is employed a lot of times.
People are different, people like different things, and people want to be treated individually.
Discounts
Discounts help a lot in conversion, it might also higher your average order value, but giving discounts means to lower your operational margin. You have to find the perfect discount that gives the buyer an incentive to buy but also is low enough to give you as a merchant the biggest profit. Do you know if there is a difference in conversion between an 7% and a 8% discount? Do you know if 5 € fix discount is better then a free shipping discount?
Enough in stock
Biggest mistake in retail: Being out of stock, second biggest mistake in retail: Being over stock So it is a very tough decision how many stock keeping units you should prepare before sending out a newsletter. Does your current solution give you an estimated forecast how many products you will sell?
Personalized recommendations
Amazon is already doing it for years, companies are offering a lot of solutions but currently only 25% of the resellers are already personalizing their newsletters with special offers. Actually there is no reason at all for you to not personalize the offers in your next newsletter. It is a free lunch and will give you more sales. Algorithms are already available everywhere and should be adapted for your use case. Besides you should collect feedback to see how successful your new system it.
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