December Newsletter

While Santa is saying ho, ho, ho, all of us in the ecom world are saying go, go, go!

December is your chance to close out Q4 on a positive note and keep that momentum going into the new year.

Over the past year we’ve seen some changes in the email + SMS landscape, so this is a must-read to make sure you’re keeping your strategy up to date.

Ideas To Implement This Month:

Holiday Cutoffs + Messaging:

Since we’re entering the biggest gift-giving season, you’ll want to focus some of your energy and efforts on planting that seed. Most of the year people are shopping for themselves, so it makes sense that the product page messaging and ads are all about the benefits for the consumer.

Now is your chance to flip that and throw in a few emails focusing on how your products are the PERFECT gift, and make it easy for them to sort through your site to find the best gift.

If you have the capabilities to offer gift wrapping, order notes, or gift cards, give those value props their own callouts within your campaigns.

You’ll also want to take the chance to let them know if you have a cutoff date for ordering their gifts. Some of the best performing campaigns we’ve made revolve around the “last day for guaranteed delivery” theme.

Our Top Campaigns From 2022:

The same messages brands were sending years ago just won’t cut it in today’s competitive landscape. Just like your Facebook ads have evolved, your content email and SMS content should too. Here’s some specific types of email that performed the best for our clients this year.

Asking Questions: Make your customers feel like they’re a part of your brand! Make your question seem authentic, because if they feel included, they’re more likely to spread the word about how much they love your products.

Asking these questions also comes with another crucial bonus – boosting future deliverability. When they reply to your emails, it sends signals to the email providers saying “people want to hear from us so much that they actually respond to our emails”. This will help you like in the primary inbox in the future.

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Question Examples:

Car Maintenance Brand: We developed a campaign giving their customers some tips on how to get their car to 1,000,000 miles, and we concluded it with “how many miles does your car have?”

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Brick & Mortar Store With Beer On Tap: The subject line for this one was “open this email if you love beer”, and it got a TON of interaction. Asked them what’s their favorite type of beer and added in some multiple choice options to make it easy for them to respond.

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Beauty Brand: They were launching a new shade of lipstick so we asked “what should we call this shade?”

We added in a $100 prize if their shade suggestion was chosen, and people flooded their inbox with creative name ideas for the shade.

Subject Line Winners:

This is one of my favorite segments from these monthly updates. Whenever I’m drafting a new campaign, I like to guess which one will perform the best before I send it out, and sometimes, I'm even surprised by the winner!

Add some A/B tests to your upcoming campaigns to see what your customers respond best to. 

P.S. - If you want to learn more about the strategies we use here at OMG Commerce, listen to our recent episode of eCommerce Evolution where Brett & I took a deep dive into the topic.

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Here are some of the recent tests we ran, along with which one was the most successful.

*The / in the subject lines is the break between the subject line and preview text

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#1 - Automotive Brand

A.) Buy One, Get One FREE 🎉

B.) Your BOGO Deal Awaits

Variation A had higher open AND clicks rates. Usually we recommend staying away from all caps in the subject line, but it’s okay to emphasize certain words to help them stand out. For this brand, we’ll continue to test out the capitalization, the emphasis of “FREE” and emojis to see which part of that subject line stood out.

#2 - Beauty Brand

It’s not just subject lines that you should be testing, but content as well!

For this brand we tested sending out 3 tutorials in an emails vs. sticking to just 1

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A.) 3 tutorials within the email

B.) 1 tutorial within the email

We got more clicks by having 3 tutorials in the email! Luckily, this brand produces a ton of binge-worthy content that their customers love watching, this is a strategy we can continue to use in the future.

#3  - Supplement Brand

A.) Your workouts will never be the same {{ first_name }}

B.) You have to see our brand new preworkout {{ first_name }}

Even with both subject lines containing the customer’s name, variation A proved to be the winner! This reasserts our strategy of keeping the focus on the customer and what’s in it for them, verses on the brand.