With all the marketing tools at their disposal, retailers may be overlooking one of the most popular and effective channels: email. After 45 years, this workhorse of the digital marketer’s toolkit still offers the highest ROI of any channel, and is customers’ preferred method of contact.
To help retailers get ahead of the coming holiday season, data solutions provider Return Path today released Email Marketing for Retailers, a new guide highlighting nine key factors that drive an effective email program.
Following are a few of the report’s key insights:
● Sender reputation is critical to reaching the inbox. No matter how great the offer may be, customers can’t buy if they never receive your message – and poor sender reputation practically guarantees your email will land in the spam folder. Mailbox providers rely on sender reputation to make filtering decisions, ensuring that only the messages their users really want are delivered to the inbox. Retailers need to monitor their sender reputation and the various factors that influence it.
● Quality tops quantity when it comes to email list. Retailers are particularly susceptible to list hygiene issues, largely due to point of sale email acquisition tactics that result in typos and bad email addresses. Unfortunately, mailing to these bad addresses can damage a retailer’s sending reputation or even land them on a blacklist. Retailers should take steps to maintain a clean sending list, using best practices provided in this guide.
● Retailers are in a battle for their customers’ attention. The average consumer receives seven marketing emails per day, and 14 percent receive more than 20 marketing emails per day. Retailers need to give customers a reason to engage if they’re going to win the battle for attention and wallet share. This means keeping customers engaged with strong onboarding, rigorous testing, and targeted messaging based on individual behaviors and preferences.