This upcoming Holiday season will challenge independent retailers to stay ahead of big-box stores, Amazon, and Wal-Mart. With 76% of holiday shoppers preferring to purchase exclusively online, there’s more pressure than ever for marketers to use the fundamentals wisely.
To help retailers with their Holiday Marketing, NP Digital and Modern Postcard teamed up to present on Direct Mail + Email Best Practices That Drive Holiday Sales.
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Presented by Aparna Sura, Director of Email Marketing for NP Digital, and Chris Foster, VP New Business for Modern Postcard, the 1-hour webinar focused on the specific tips and ideas to help marketers use email and Direct Mail more effectively.
“Our webinars pull together data from the industry, deliver education on why and how channels affect consumer behavior and give practical advice – with examples – on how to better market a business,” says Foster. “By teaming up with NP Digital, who are experts in digital marketing, we can deliver unique content and education to brands they can’t get anywhere else.”
This webinar brought together the two different speakers and perspectives of marketing, leveraging the expertise of both presenters and businesses.
“When looking at email marketing, it’s best to see it within the entirety of all the other marketing channels,” says Sura. “We have launched many, many successful email marketing campaigns for clients, so it’s helpful to show brands the kinds of tactics and techniques we use so they can better reach, engage, and drive conversions from their email lists.”
The webinar was created because many retail owners and marketers can’t always stay up to date on the latest best-practices. The email portion of the webinar included in-depth discussion and real-life examples of these email tactics:
- Optimizing your post-purchase email
- Offering relevant sign-up incentives
- Segmenting audience based on engagement, entry points, and more
- Optimizing send-time based on time zone, ages, or prior action
- Experimenting with animation to attract and engage
- Product launch messaging and early access ideas to create exclusivity
- Using cart abandonment as a trigger to help convert online sales
- Personalizing email content to recognize customer events
- Improving everything about the cadence, messaging, and offers through testing
“We know marketers are busy, so we wanted to compress our years of learning and hundreds of campaigns into the essential lessons they could use to improve their email marketing,” says Sura.
Along with the email knowledge, the webinar featured tips on how to connect email and CRM information into fuel for Direct Mail programs.
“Direct Mail is just as relevant and powerful as before,” says Foster, “and now, the data connectivity makes it easier than ever to link email addresses to Household addresses. And, Direct Mail automation technology allows marketers to send ‘trigger’ mailings based on behavior, action, and data.”
Because match rates of emails to Household addresses are up to 80%, taking an email list and turning it into a high-value, proprietary mailing list is a way for marketers to take advantage of all their data.
“With Direct Mail having 35% higher engagement than email, adding Direct Mail is the perfect complement to email programs,” says Foster.
- The Direct Mail portion of the webinar covered topics like:
- Why Direct Mail engages with the brains of customers
- How the longer shelf-life for Direct Mail helps brands stay top-of-mind
- The ways Direct Mail rates high for motivation, attention, and ease of understanding
- Creating an effective Direct Mail postcard layout
- Keeping messaging succinct and persuasive
- Using testimonials and offers to increase conversion
- Testing QR codes and other devices to drive offline-to-online responses
- Integrating Direct Mail and other Digital Marketing tactics beyond email
Both speakers fielded questions at the end of the webinar, which brought visitors from across the country to representing a variety of Small to Mid-Sized businesses from every category including Retail and Consumer Services.