PORTLAND, Ore., June 5, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As marketers prepare for Father's Day, a Yesmail Interactive analysis of Mother's Day email campaigns shows that many brands wait too long to hit the "send" button on holiday promotions.
While nearly half of marketers deployed emails during the week leading up to Mother's Day 2014, those messages actually received the lowest open rates. Using its Market Intelligence tool, Yesmail, Yes Lifecycle Marketing's email marketing solutions provider, analyzed the top 50 retailers and found that emails sent within the two weeks prior to the holiday had an average open rate of 16.4 percent, compared to an open rate of 14.9 percent the week of Mother's Day.
The findings suggest that consumers get saturated by offers closer to holidays or have already completed their shopping, which means marketers can boost sales by getting the timing for email campaigns right.
"Open rates dropped as Mother's Day approached, indicating that consumers are in the exploratory phase of the purchase process more than a week before the holiday," said Mike Fisher, president of Yes Lifecycle Marketing. "A few days can make a dramatic difference in open rates, indicating that marketers have to be attuned to where customers are in the path to purchase."
Open rates for Mother's Day emails were 13.5 percent higher than general promotional emails during the same period – yet only 54 percent of top retailers ran Mother's Day campaigns. 30 percent of those who deployed Mother's Day emails sent one to three weeks prior to the holiday, 44 percent of them sent the emails only during the week of Mother's Day, while 26 percent ran emails during both timeframes.
Of emails with high open rates, many integrated strong calls to action or offers. Based on the retailers analyzed, the most popular and successful promotion was the percent-off offer, which was used by 65 percent of. This type of promotion attained the highest average open rate, at 17.4 percent. In contrast, buy-and-get-free offers (16.6 percent), money off (13.2 percent) and rewards points (11.6 percent) trailed.
In the month leading up to Mother's Day, 94 percent of retailers ran holiday-themed social media campaigns. Mother's Day Facebook posts received 134 percent higher average engagement rates compared to non-Mother's Day posts, while Mother's Day tweets received 10.6 percent more engagement rates compared to non-Mother's Day tweets. Despite the higher engagement rate for Facebook, Facebook posts accounted for only 26 percent of social deployments for the retailers analyzed.
"During Father's Day, retailers should be intentional about deploying messages with a strong call-to-action, offers that consumers respond to and promotions that are well-received," said Fisher. "Marketers should take what we have learned in our Mother's Day findings and apply them to their Father's Day campaign strategies."
Forr more information on the Mother's Day findings and implications for Father's Day campaigns, click here.
About Yesmail Interactive
We power intelligent customer interactions. We give you the insights to recognize and understand your customer to deliver contextually relevant digital communications- while respecting their preferences and privacy. We help marketers evolve their customer relationships through intelligent interactions via technology, insights and services in a near real time multi-channel environment. We help you compete in the age of the customer. For more information, visit www.yesmail.com.
About Yes Lifecycle Marketing
Yes Lifecycle Marketing is a solution provider that brings together multichannel marketing platforms and data, with creative and strategy services honed on the optimization of delivering relevant marketing messages. This gives marketers the ability to source best-of-breed technology and creative and strategy services from a single vendor at a cost-effective price point. For more information, visit www.yeslifecyclemarketing.com.