On the Cover

This article originally appeared in the DEC. 2012 issue of CUSTOMER Magazine.

More companies are beginning to send out targeted offers, but a lot of these efforts would probably be a lot more successful if the promotions were better timed and packaged for consumption on smartphones.

That’s the word from Matt Gault, vice president of channel strategy at Yesmail Interactive. The 15-year-old company, which provides e-mail, social and digital delivery, tracking and managing services to such companies as Coke, HP and Intel (News - Alert), recently released a holiday shopping report based on a survey of 500 consumers and an analysis of the digital marketing campaigns of 20 leading brands.

The survey revealed that one out of two e-mails will be viewed from a smartphone. Most brands did pretty well in making sure their e-mails rendered well on mobile, said Gault, but there were quite a few brands where their e-mails linked to sites that didn’t render well on mobile devices.

Time of day is another thing that brands need to pay close attention to in designing their e-mail campaigns, Gault added. Most people (39 percent, according to the study) shop online between 6 and 10 p.m., yet e-mail promotions are usually sent (41 percent of the time, according to the study) between 2 and 6 a.m. Thirty one percent of promotional e-mail is sent between 6 and 10 a.m. And only 5 percent of e-mails sent during peak shopping times.

Here are some other results from the study:• Half of consumers are influenced by social media when making an online purchase, compared to 42 percent for in-store purchases.• 34 percent have purchased a product as a direct result of a social media promotion. • Only 8 percent of Facebook (News - Alert) campaigns and 4 percent of Twitter campaigns for the brands tracked focused on money-saving promotions.

• Brands aren’t using Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) to offer promotions, even though 34 percent of shoppers have been influenced by a social media deal.• Three-quarters of consumers own smartphones or tablets, but only 19 percent make mobile purchases.• The practice of showrooming is common – 62 percent of consumers have used a mobile device to compare web product prices while in a store.

• More than 41 percent of mobile device owners have made an online or in-store purchase as a direct result of an email promotion viewed on their device, yet, of the 20 brands Yesmail analyzed, one-third of those e-mails linked to web pages that were not mobile-optimized.

Gault added that another barrier to brand building via online channels is that social folks are on one side of an organization and email marketing folks are on other. That can lead to less than optimal results because if an e-mail promotion is sent with a Twitter campaign, there’s typically 25 percent higher engagement/clicks than if the e-mail is sent without a Twitter campaign associated with it.

“It doesn’t make sense to keep email and social separate,” he said.