Week of September 6, 2012:

This week, we’re going to help you get ready for the holidays with a retail email marketing webinar to prep you for the 2012 holiday season. We’re also inviting you to meet up at Dreamforce, as well as looking at some re-engagement and reactivation email marketing.

Finally, we’ll give you one of several upcoming holiday forecasts so that you can best time your holiday email marketing.

Christopher S. Penn, Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Up to 40% of retail revenue lands during the holiday shopping season. Retailers are gearing up to spend a lot of time and money driving traffic to their websites – and sending many emails to do so. 87% sent at least 1 promotional e-mail on Cyber Monday in 2011, helping to drive over $1.25B in revenue that day alone. Yet as inboxes get more crowded, it is increasingly important get the right message to the right customer at the right time.

In this webinar on September 13, 2012 at 2 PM ET, Brad McGinity of Windsor Circle and Brittany Schneider of WhatCounts will share email marketing strategies, content, and design best practices to get you ready for the 2012 holiday season.

Register now for the webinar!

Not able to make it? Read the email too late? Don’t worry! Sign up and you’ll get a copy of the recording instead.

Want to get even more insight and access to great discussions about email marketing? Join our LinkedIn group, Enterprise Email Marketers, and catch discussions, polls, and debates about what’s happening in email marketing now.

Want to meet members of the WhatCounts team and share your experiences finding and growing your email marketing ROI? Here’s a list of upcoming events where you can interact with the WhatCounts team.

September 18-21: Dreamforce, San Francisco, CA

WhatCounts Director of Inbound Marketing Christopher Penn will be speaking on digital marketing ROI along with several members of our team. If you’re going to Dreamforce, sign up to have coffee with WhatCounts!

October 3-5: MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, MA

WhatCounts Director of Inbound Marketing Christopher Penn will be speaking on marketing ROI, as well as hosting a breakfast table on email marketing.

WhatCounts is hiring EVEN MORE PEOPLE!

We’ve got a whole careers page full of opportunities for you to showcase how well you know email marketing, and more positions being posted every day. If you know email marketing, come work for WhatCounts!

Marketing Education

In this week’s newsletter, we’re going to share some advance data to help you with the 2012 retail shopping season. Be sure to sign up for our webinar so that you can get additional ideas and strategies! We’ve got lots more to share that just won’t fit in a newsletter.

First, let’s look at how the consumer shops online. Most of us go through several shopping stages – browsing, serious looking, and purchasing. As marketers, we want to know when we should be coordinating our email marketing with consumer intent. So let’s look at three phrases that people will search for to see when the trends hit – and when you should be in the inbox.

Let’s start with gift ideas. People look for gift ideas when the holidays first appear on their mental radar, and they start to casually browse:

We see very clearly that the search begins for gift ideas as early as mid-October. That’s when searches for gift ideas begin to ramp up above normal. Consider having an email in the inbox of your shoppers in mid-October with a list of gift ideas for whoever is your customer. Bear in mind as well that this doesn’t just mean B2C retailers. If you’ve got any kind of product or service that people actually want (as opposed to need but do not feel strongly about), you have an opportunity to leverage the holiday season.

Once the consumer has browsed around and had conversations, it’s time to get serious. The way we tell? They look for free shipping:

We see that inquiries about free shipping begin to increase at the beginning of November and spike right after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. These inquiries sustain heavy volume all the way until the week before Christmas. Look to be aggressively sending holiday specials with free shipping, free gift wrap, and other amenities to be present during this time.

It’s curious at first to see demand drop off before the holidays, but then you realize that free shipping becomes secondary for the consumer to actually purchasing a gift at all. That’s when we see last minute gift ideas take flight:

If you have the ability to meet last minute demand, it makes great sense to be sending out heavy email volume in the days leading up to the big holidays. Be sure you can meet the demand of customers, however – nothing will lose you a customer for life faster than missing a holiday shipment that was a guaranteed last minute purchase.

Need more ideas? There’s a webinar for that.