Marketing conventions are comfortable things. Marketers hold onto them - fall into well-worn grooves - especially when there’s money on the line. During busy periods, when every decision carries more weight, it can be comforting for everyone involved to opt for the familiar, proven choice. During Black Friday, brands can offer deeper discounts to drive sales. To grab attention, brands can add more urgent language. And to stand out, brands can use customers' names to stand out from the crowd. Marketers have spent so long deploying these tactics that they’ve stopped questioning their efficacy - and whether they actually work anymore.
Jacquard, a London-headquartered marketing platform, recently analysed over 200 billion email sends from major retailers over the past decade - looking specifically at campaigns during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas - to find out if these conventions really did work, or if the marketing world was barking up the wrong tree.
Perhaps one of their most significant discoveries was that their findings challenged accepted wisdom around discounts. In retail, and more broadly, the standard logic tells you that if a 40% discount performs well, then a 70% discount must perform even better. It’s understood that the more money the consumer saves, the more likely they are to purchase the item in question.
However, Jacquard’s findings suggested that this belief was mistaken. Their research found, in fact, that discounts above 60% show basically no benefit compared to offers in the 30-50% range. In fact, the best performing discount range is 40-49% off, with 30-39% also doing well. If you go higher than 60%, you won’t see any additional lift in engagement.
This is partially due to increasingly savvy consumers. A huge discount - say, 75% - suggests that there might be an issue with the item, and that the retailer might be trying to clear stock for a multitude of reasons (none of them good). There are a dozen more questions as to why there might be such an extreme discount on offer, but by the time anyone’s pondered these, their thumbs have already taken them way past your email.
On the flip side, however, any discount under 10% actually hurts engagement during the holidays. It can seem insulting. Again, savvy shoppers know that bigger discounts lie in wait at other retailers and will be prepared to go searching. Offering a discount that’s less than 10% is patronising: it reads like you don’t understand the financial pressure people are under.
Another convention Jacquard’s findings challenged was the notion of ‘personalisation’ as a panacea. It’s long been held to be true in marketing circles that personalising an email - adding customer first names, and phrases like ‘for you’ - is a surefire way to ensure your subject line cuts through the noise. Jacquard’s study suggested that actually wasn’t the case, and that, in fact, personalisation of this nature can actually reduce engagement during the holidays.
This doesn’t, however, mean that personalisation is entirely dead. Instead, it suggests that lazy, shallow personalisation now reads as transparently robotic. Consumers are familiar with filling out forms for most retailers they engage with - having a first name on file isn’t going to impress anyone. And so when brands appear after years of radio silence, to send emails that name old customers, it feels distinctly like you’ve been plucked from a database compiled by an impersonal algorithm.
Actual personalisation is more than just a name. It’s context. Building an actual relationship with a customer, or offering meaningful personalisation beyond the purely cosmetic - suggestions that are genuinely helpful, an understanding of the customer’s profile - will always be valuable. Jamming a first name into a subject line and praying for the best, won’t.
During the holidays - November and December namely - urgency tactics take a huge 75% dip in effectiveness, according to the data. Every brand is using them, so they just become meaningless. If everything’s urgent, then nothing can be. Besides, it’s obvious that things are urgent. It’s Christmas - just stepping into any shop will tell you that time is running out. There are enough reminders that the holiday season is upon us: long queues of grumpy shoppers on the weekend; glassy-eyed, overworked staff behind cash registers; public transport packed with holiday shoppers clutching oversized plastic bags. Adding urgent language on top of all this just adds to the needless stress.
The Jacquard study also discovered some fun linguistic quirks in holiday email subject lines. A single question mark was found to drive engagement four times higher than an exclamation mark during the holidays.
Question marks feel like conversation. They’re dynamic: they force the reader to respond, even if it’s just mentally formulating an answer. Exclamation marks, on the other hand, just add to the general frenetic noise of a holiday-season inbox. In the same way reading a subject line in all caps can feel as if you’re being screamed at, too-liberal use of exclamation marks can feel shouty and annoying. Especially in the context of other brands using exclamation marks - the noise only builds, and digital migraines aren’t far away.
Emoji use was also found to be vital. The Christmas tree emoji is the single most effective tactic Jacquard measured in their entire study. It outperforms the exclamation mark by 13 times. However, on the other hand, the snowflake emoji actively hurt engagement.
The difference is about specificity and emotional resonance. The meaning of a Christmas tree is clear: it’s festive, familiar, and nostalgic. It conjures images of families huddled on couches or gathered around crackling fireplaces. A snowflake just refers to a season. It’s vague, and unclear. Instead of cultivating a hit of Yuletide warmth, the snowflake just reads as cold and impersonal.
The real conclusions from Jacquard’s study are twofold. Marketers need to be more rigorous in challenging accepted conventions around holiday marketing - simply falling back into playing the hits can actively damage outreach towards the end of the year. Secondly, marketers should be cautious not to underestimate the consumer. Around Black Friday and Christmas, more than any other period, consumers are subjected to a blizzard of marketing efforts that try everything: tugging at heartstrings, impressing urgency, and calling them by name.
The inbox is a conversation. Brands that treat it as such will still be able to iterate and adapt in ten years time. The ones that don’t may find themselves just adding to the noise - and fading to static.
Image:
Justin Lim / Unsplash
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