Email Marketing: Three Best Practices from the Holiday Season

Do your emails work as hard as these?

There are lessons to learn from the marketing emails that we all received during the recent holiday selling season. Here is a review of some effective strategies that email marketers were putting to good use:

• BestBuy.com used a strong linking strategy in its emails. The retailer’s emails included clickable links to product categories like computers, audio/MP3, and televisions. If you clicked on one category, you arrived at a page with clickable images of specific products. If you then clicked on one product, you went to a product description where you could enter your zip code and locate that product in a store near you. That link-to-link process was intuitive for users, and well planned.

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• Lord & Taylor built both urgency and calls to action into its subject lines. One was “Open NOW for your $20 Holiday Bonus” and another “Up to 50% off boots + FREE OVERNIGHT SHIPPING on orders over $99.” J. Crew applied a similar strategy too, in email subject lines like, “New styles added to final sale (plus, extra 15% off!).”

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• Amazon.com used customers’ previous purchases to customize holiday emails. If customers previously bought a Kindle, a cookbook, or a DVD of a Broadway show, they got emails that offered new products in those categories. Amazon.com has been a pioneer in considering past purchases before sending marketing emails. It’s a best practice that is worth remembering.