In a recent watching of book retailers, I plotted email sending behaviour in the lead up to Father’s Day 2020 (in Australia). The main criteria was, if an email had content in it regarding Father’s Day, then it goes on the timeline.
It was clear that businesses took very different approaches to marketing for Father’s Day, and they seemed to fill some general categories.
The ‘we have other things to do’ senders. From the bottom up – you can see the orange and grey retailers have large gaps between their initial sends and the actual day. Apart from one just before the day itself, they seem to have a very light touch when it comes to marketing via email.
Often this thinking comes from an ’email marketing isn’t that good’ approach, or a general overwhelming of people in the business who can’t focus on tasks like email. Priorities are higher elsewhere.
The ‘send a lot’ senders. This is really interested in sending, so they’ve gone out VERY early with 8 weeks of sending email in the hopes that people will see the email and order at some point. Routinely though, so just once a week.
The ‘standard’ senders take a different approach. This is the yellow and red lines. It’s just an email a week, a month out. No big ramp up, maybe an extra send one week. It’s pretty standard.
What kind of sender are you like? In my mind these are all very conservative behaviours. No business looks to be sending a lot closer to the date, and actually from the whole list of senders this is just a portion who have bothered to send email at all.
Looking at this timeline where would you place yourself? What other ways of sending are missing here that you would imagine might work?