Best Practices for Sending Multiple Daily Deals & Emails

How to send multiple deal emails without annoying your audience

Since 66% of all deal purchases come from email, sending daily deal emails to alert your customers of what you have to offer is incredibly important. Email is not the only channel where daily deals convert, but it's the primary hub for conversions.

Best Practices for Sending Deal Emails

Segmentation is key - Sending out untargeted email blasts to deal subscribers is a big mistake when it comes to the daily deal industry. Receiving too many irrelevant offers is a chief complaint from many daily deal subscribers. Ask your subscribers key information beyond their location such as gender, age and interests through a manage preferences center. You can also gain information on their interests through click behavior, or you can conduct periodic surveys of your subscribers to gather more detailed profile information over time, continually improving your targeting by providing content tailored to their interests. Using these tactics, you will be able build a profile for each subscriber so you can segment your lists and provide members with deals targeted to their specific interests. Remember, the quality of the list is as important as its size.

Timing is everything – Email timing is also extremely important for daily deal companies. If people don’t open emails on time, they miss out on expiring deals and the company and merchant both miss out on a sale. When is the best time to send an email? Answering that question can be a challenge since optimal send times are a moving target based on many variables. Test your email messages to see when your subscribers are opening them. Timing is everything, so test, analyze and optimize. Given the timing competition around daily deals sends, also work on targeting inactive or unengaged subscribers by automating “win-back” messages.

What makes these best practices the best practices?

Simplicity is at the root of the incredible success we have seen with daily deal sites. It's a simple and effective way to connect consumers with great deals from merchants right in their neighborhood. Now daily deal marketing practices are evolving to the next level. Segmentation, deliverability and timing have been core online marketing best practices for years now and their value has been proven time and time again, especially with cross-channel marketing campaigns in which email plays a central role.

Regarding segmentation and timing, getting the right offer at the right time makes all of the difference in the world. Daily deal providers that analyze data and periodically survey their subscribers to learn more about them can better segment their lists by interest and preferences.

Email vs Social

Email is the primary gateway for daily deal sign ups and remains the primary delivery vehicle for offers, so it definitely plays a crucial role in driving sales. Ultimately, it comes down to a consumer seeing a great deal targeted to their interests, and that can happen via email, social or mobile channels.

The benefit of social media is that your social connections usually know you well, so when people share deals via Facebook, Twitter or other social networks, they have a high likelihood of leading to a purchase. Also, you may be signed up to receive deals via email, but you also follow the provider on Twitter and Facebook. In fact, many people spend so much more time in social networks than on email, so it may be the first place they find a deal. So, while email is the communications hub for daily deal offers and still the place where most deals convert, daily deal companies should leverage the mobile and social channels for even higher conversions and for better engagement with fans and followers.

Best Practices for Sending Additional Deal Emails

In those situations when you want to send more than one deal email in a day, keep the following few tips in mind to make sure that you don't end up alienating your audience or seeming like a spammer. The key points to remember? Less is more, and exact repetition is never your friend.

Don't overdo it. Stay focused on your regular morning email and only use the additional emails when you have something really valuable to say. You want to be sure that you don't annoy your customers by cluttering up their inboxes! When it comes to email marketing, quality trumps quantity every time.

Never send the same email as you did in the morning. Under no circumstances should you ever send an identical email twice, let alone twice in one day. If you aren’t changing the subject line and featuring different emails, what’s the point? Repetitive emails are one of the fastest ways to convince your audience to unsubscribe.

Make sure you change your subject line to reflect your special offer. If you don’t change your subject line, most of your audience will assume that the second email was a mistake and delete it without opening it.

Include a special promo code at the top of the email. Since you are sending your customers two emails in one day, you want to make it worth their while to open the second one by including a special offer, like a $5 off promotional code.