You Take the Good, You Take the Bad...

Wel, perhaps I was a bit too hasty to applaud Lane Bryant (see March 25th post). After heading down to the store and picking up my order on the 25th, on the 30th I got another email... reminding me to pick up my order at the store.

You mean to tell me, their CRM system doesn't have a pickup flag that can suppress these emails? I have to wonder now, how many more I will get. This thought doesn't make me want to use their in-store pickup again.

You should always have a suppression system in place for these sort of transactional emails - e.g., don't send an email asking for a product review on an item someone has returned; once someone has submitted said review, don't send them a follow-up reminder to review it; and so on.

A Smart Cross-Channel Tactic

So I decided to try Lane Bryant's new ship-to-store service, since it's free. When I received the confirmation email a few days later, letting me know that my item was ready to be picked up, I was pleasantly surprised by the ad at the bottom:




A coupon for 30% off at the store, which is only valid when I come and pick up my online order. What a great way to get someone (like me) to purchase, rather than just walking in, grabbing my order, and leaving. Do you have site-to-store? Do you cross-promote your channels? It can drive incremental revenue!

Easy Ways to Make Your Analytics Program Work for You

First off, if you have someone internal who does analytics for your company, it is worthwhile to log in and do some exploration yourself. Many analytics people have to be focused on several departments' goals at once, and may not have the same ideas in mind that you do about what is important for your email program.

Looking at customer behavior in depth can give you some amazing insights into buying habits and engagement. Here is an example from my own experience.

We send 5 consumer emails on a regular basis. One of these emails converts at a significantly lower rate than the others. In digging into the data, I discovered that the most popular time historically for sales on that site is around 5 PM on Wednesdays. We had been sending our emails out on Wednesday mornings. This week, I ran an A/B split test, with half of the emails going out at the regular 10:30 AM, and half at 3 PM (allowing for ESP throttling, so that the emails would definitely arrive by 5).

Since the emails were just sent yesterday, I don't yet have the data back to see which was the winner. I'll share those results next week. The point of all of this is, you never know what you are assuming about your customers and your program until you dig into the numbers yourself. And, of course, test like crazy.