Don’t filter email out of your marketing strategy

A complete retail marketing program should include a healthy email component.

Email has been around long enough for some observers to label it a “legacy” technology. While the notion of checking email may bring back memories of dial-up modems and online bulletin boards, it remains a widely-used form of digital communication with real value as a retail marketing tool.

Here are three retailers still excited to see customer replies to their promotional emails in their inboxes.

Michaels brings inactive emails back

The Michaels Companies Inc. is successfully reactivating customer email addresses for marketing purposes. During the 2021 holiday season, initially discovered the 4.8 million customer email addresses were at risk of becoming inactive due to customers not opening an email from the retailer in nine to 12 months.

To re-engage these email subscribers, Michael’s leveraged 3radical audience engagement solutions to implement a survey and holiday-themed “advent calendar” that included a combination of unique events, incentives to purchase, and a progressive data capture mechanism.

In addition to wanting to re-engage inactive email users, Michaels wanted to learn more about its customers’ hobbies, why they shopped with the retailer, and what type of communications they preferred. So, customers received two emails a day for seven days promoting the advent calendar, as well as an invitation to take a survey and subsequently receive rewards.

As a result, Michaels was able to reactivate more than 80,000 customer emails, and can offer customers who responded to the surveys more precisely targeted offers.

Farfetch optimizes email language
London-based online luxury fashion retailer Farfetch optimizes the brand language it uses in its digital marketing campaigns. To enhance customer engagement, Farfetch utilizes the Phrasee Engage solution, which creates optimized, on-brand content for use across email, push, and SMS text broadcast campaigns.

Initially, the company piloted Phrasee Engage to optimize the subject lines in broadcast campaigns targeted to a chosen group of customers or subscribers, such as promotional messages to promote purchasing a specific item.

After seeing positive results from Phrasee Engage, Farfetch started piloting Phrasee React, which leverages real-time brand language optimization to create personalized short-form content for trigger and lifecycle campaigns across email, push and SMS.

Trigger and lifecycle campaigns are communications that are automatically sent based on a subscriber's particular action or behavioral pattern. These can include welcome messages to a customer after signing up or post-purchase. These campaigns included its welcome emails, abandoned basket, browse, and wishlist.

L’Occitane creates ‘fear of missing out’

Global beauty and skincare products retailer L’Occitane drove digital Black Friday sales by integrating customer polling data into targeted emails. L’Occitane, which already sent out highly personalized marketing emails, decided that for Black Friday 2021, it would drive “fear of missing out” (FOMO) by instilling a sense of urgency to buy promoted products.

To create buzz and encourage Black Friday purchases, the retailer displayed the number of shoppers who bought a trending item that week, so email recipients were tempted to follow suit. Using the Movable Ink behavioral tracking pixel, L’Occitane automatically displayed the highest trending products with the most accurate number of purchases that were made at the time of send.

The company also leveraged Movable Ink’s progressive polling functionality to seamlessly collect zero-party data, generated when a customer clicked on their favorite type of product within the email, enabling it to capture that purchase intent.

L’Occitane then used that chosen preference for upcoming promotional emails to target relevant messaging and discounts that help drive purchases. For example, if the customer clicked on the “Fragrance” option in the initial progressive polling email, they were retargeted with a discount banner in the follow-up send that highlighted a 20% off sale, including fragrances.