Achieving Twice the Traffic with 1/3rd the List
Proflowers Wins the Valentine's Day War through Testing, Segmentation, and Re-engagement
February 11th, 2010 was the key web traffic day for Valentine’s Day flower shoppers. All the major online flower vendors achieved their major holiday traffic spike on that day. A close examination of the data utilizing the Email Data Source tool, Email Analyst, suggests that Proflowers was able to achieve extraordinary success with an email strategy that relied heavily on targeted and segmented email campaigns tied to exhaustive testing of creative and an agressive WinBack campaign strategy. 
According to the Alexa web reach per million measurements, Proflowers achieved 71% more traffic than 1-800-Flowers and 126% more than FTD on their peak traffic day leading up to Valentine’s Day.
An examination of the emails campaigns sent during February monitored by EDS and the EDS panel of active inboxes reveal that these traffic gains were achieved despite the fact that the average reach of their email campaigns in February was one third the reach of their top competitors during the same time.
Re-engagement:
A significant campaign strategy was an agressive series of Winback campaigns leading up to the Valentine's Day holiday. Proflowers ran at least 7 reengagement campaigns just before Valentine’s Day, a strategy that does not seem to be echoed in their competitor's strategies.
Below are the subject lines and dates of the re-engagement campaigns Proflowers ran:
Jan 25th: We Haven't Seen You in a While... Come Back for 10% off
Feb 1st: $19.99 Valentine's Day Flowers to Win You Back! Order Soon to Avoid Rush Charges.
Feb 2nd: Can Cupid Bring Us Back Together?
Feb 8th: $19.99 for 18 Assorted Roses, Come Back!
Feb 8th: $19.99 Tulips or Roses, Come Back to Us!
Feb 8th: Will You Come Back to Us for 20% off? Expires Wednesday!
Feb 10th: Last Chance! 47% Off if You Come Back Now
Segmentation and Subject Line Testing.
In addition to re-engagement campaigns, Proflowers engaged in a strategy of segmentation, targeted emails, and creative cycling.To illustrate, below are the subject lines for 10 different campaigns that Proflowers ran on February 8th, along with estimations of the relative sizes of each audience segment.
(The percentage numbers are for estimates based on panel data and do not necessarily reflect the actual percentages of the Proflowers list. The numbers were calculated with the following assumptions: the campaign with the largest reach was scored as 100% of the list and all other campaigns list percentages were based off of that).
Below are the subject lines for all the emails sent by Proflowers on Feb 8th along with their estimated percentage of list. Notice there are 3 re-engagement campaigns:
$19.99 for 18 Assorted Roses, Come Back! (7.76%)
$19.99 for 18 Assorted Roses, Last Chance! (20.47%)
$19.99 Tulips or Roses, Come Back to Us! (7.2%)
$19.99 Tulips or Roses, Last Chance for Valentine's Day! (15.67%)
20% Off at ProFlowers just for RedEnvelope Customers (7.76%)
Bouquets From $19.99. Give Great, Save Great. (32.60%)
Last Chance for Long Stemmed Red Roses at $39.98 (13.41%)
Last Chance for Long Stemmed Red Roses at $39.99 (3.95%)
Thanks Again. Please Accept These Special Savings. (4.66%)
Will You Come Back to Us for 20% off? Expires Wednesday! (8.04%)
In contrast, Proflowers competitors sent out far fewer emails to a larger percentage of their list. For comparison’s sake, the following campaigns were sent by 1-800flowers on the same day (using the same percentage of list calculation):
Free Shipping on Gift Baskets starting at $29.99 - lock in today's prices (17.82%)
Free Shipping: 3 Bouquets only $29.99 each - Limited Supply (56.02%)
Free Shipping: Long Stem Red Roses with FREE Ruby Vase - While Supplies Last (74.24%)
Has it been a year already? (1.96%)
Delivery
Regarding Inbox Delivery, Proflowers emails had very good delivery with over 90% inbox delivery for AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail, compared to top competitors who achieved less than 90% delivery to the same ISP’s during the same period.
they are doing with their partners. Aadvantage started the year with a campaign urging members to ask their friends for spare miles. The email contained a link to "Tell a friend you need miles!" This campaign was received by 1.28% percent of our email panelists starting on January 6. This compares with a reach of 1.50% for the AAdvantage monthly statement. This indicates that AAdvantage likely sent the campaign to a large percentage of its members. 
This campaign was received by 0.34% of our email panelists starting on January 20, 2010. Compared to the 1.50% of panelists who received mileage statements by email, and the ShareAA Miles campaign recipient percentage of 1.28%, this might indicate that the campaign was sent to a smaller user base.
This first screen shot shows a bar chart, plotting the reach of a sender's email campaigns across our panel of 250,000 email users. The charts can be adjusted to see a daily, weekly or monthly view of email campaign activity and reach. Charts are also available providing email campaign stats on the reach of email campaigns per ISP. 
For each of the hundreds of sending domains covered, we provide a snapshot of average email campaign reach, broken down by ISP. We also provide inbox deliverability statistics overall and by ISP. This is a great way for email marketers to get a quick read on potential distribution partners. For the first time, email marketers have an independent way of determing the reach of their email distribution partners, and whether the email campaigns of their potential partners make it to the inbox or end up in the spam folder. We also provide contact information for potential partners.
Zazzle is an online retailer utilizing both Twitter and Email to drive traffic to their offers. For the last 30 days (as of 1/25/2010), Email Data Source monitored nearly 2,000 Twitter posts sent by two Zazzle Twitter accounts: ZazzleWedding (1871 posts) and Zazzle (121 posts)*. 
recorded 575 tweets and 715 retweets of offers with links to brands in this sector during the last two weeks since we launched our Twitter Analytics capability. It is also interesting to see that the Twitter activity closely mimics the email marketing activity in the sector (see graph). During these two weeks, we have picked up on 530 Twitter Influencers specific to the Apparel & Fashion industry. These are people who have re-tweeted offers that link to brands in this market sector.
When I click on the link next to Twitter Influencers, I can see a list (here to the left) of who those Influencers are. Again, these are folks who have re-tweeted offers from brands in this sector. At the top you have a Twitter account with more than a million followers. Now that is someone you want re-tweeting your offers. Farther down at the bottom I see Lucky Magazine and I can see they just re-tweeted a Calvin Klein offer for sweaters to 20,000+ people. This is a big help to Calvin Klein, which only has 9,000 followers on Twitter. 
on the "Twitter Influencers" link. Doing that reveals that there are other influencers for Calvin Klein besides Lucky Magazine. I am shown a full list of the influencers, the number of followers they have, how many times they have retweeted CK offers, and the most recent offer they retweeted. Amont those that retweeted the sweater offer were Lucky Magazine, "thesalerack", NYThread, Virginianam and Marinela. These are people Calvin Klein should pay attention to and which CK's competitors should court! You can get a real sense of what offers are being aided my social media by looking at this. Lastly, I also see that another offer for 50% off all men's and women's hats and gloves, etc. was also a popular re-tweet. This is an offer that Calvin Klein put out by email on November 8th and November 15th and also on Twitter. How do we know? Well this is still Email Data Source after all...
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