Email sharing: Retailers current trend

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:51:41 GMT

A recent survey by Responsys found that now more than ever retailers are using email to drive traffic to their community efforts mainly on Facebook and Twitter.

Among the top online retailers, 88% of them include community links in their promotional emails, up from 75% in 2010"

This is an interesting statistic as although there is much talk about the slow death of email. The findings from these top retailers show that email can and should continue to live as part of an integrated strategy being harnessed to promote relevant items for the user and then guide them to community efforts such as twitter and facebook.

in fact if anything the combination of email and a good CRM means that email can be much more personal acting as the perfect personalised invitation (Wether this means using a birthday email, a subject relevant to the users location, or perhaps something relevant to their past buying history) to grab the users attention and then funnel them into a community, where a stronger relationshop can be built over the long term.

Email remins a very strong medium and even if more and more resources are being diverted to social media community efforts, there is no reason that these cannot be given a huge boost with a little clever (read personalised) effort via email.

A second intersting finding is the use of SWYN (Share with your network) links. As forwarding to a friend via email continues to decline, its seems top retailers also are focusing less on the user sharing the email amnd more on them moving further down the funnel and sharing an individual product or page.

“Three times as many retailers include share-with-your-network (SWYN) links on their product pages as regularly as they include them in their emails,” said Chad White, Research Director at Responsys and author of the report.

Again I believe this too can come down to retailers being smarter about how they personalise their email campaigns. I personal email makes less sense to be used as a share on the spot mechanism and more as a hook to bring the user down the funnel and share the products or information they find.

The entire report can be downloaded here

Orchard Website - Advertising and Marketing

Email sharing: Retailers current trend