'Tis the Season for Q4 Holiday Analysis

Happy New Year all! Now that we're back in the office and the dust from the holiday season has settled, it's time to take a look back.

While it might all be one big haze of "send!send!send!", one of the most important elements to your email program is analysis and reporting. This is the perfect opportunity to make a list of learnings while it is still fresh to improve for future years' holiday seasons.

During the next couple of weeks, we should be analyzing the following:

• Overall Q4 (fourth quarter) 2010 holiday season performance. How'd it compare with previous years? What promotions were big winners and which didn't get any traction? Make a detailed report with all of this data and incorporate next steps.
• Buyers in Q4 versus buyers in Q1-Q3. Are they first time buyers? Repeats from Q4 last year? Are they gift givers or are they personally interested in your products? For those that are exclusively Q4 buyers or gift givers, they should be receiving a different messaging stream than your typical subscriber. The goal is to determine what, if anything, they will respond to during the remainder of the year and/or reduce their frequency during their non-peak buying season.

Did your loyal customers drive others to your business this time of year for/through gifts or serve as referrers for additional business? You can get an idea of the answers to these questions through post-purchase triggers asking for reviews, feedback or surveys. You can also survey your subscriber list asking about giving and getting gifts from your business.

• Returns. Due to the higher volume of sales during Q4 you can anticipate an uptick in returns. Keep an eye on who returns and why and see where the gaps in service, quality and products exist.
• Post-holiday purchases. What are people buying after the holidays? If they are purchasing complementary products or upgrades to a particular product, for instance, we can assume they likely received the product as a gift if you don't have a past purchase in your database. You'll want to trigger messages with these cross-sells and upsells to encourage additional purchases, especially if they are first time buyers.
• Profit margins. Typically, the best discounts of the year are offered in the Q4 holiday season. Did your profit margin suffer? Taking a look at revenue and revenue per delivered is important, but ultimately, the bottom line is the total net gain at the end of the year.

In the longer term, we'll want to continually measure:

• The long-term value of Q4 buyers versus year-round/other time period buyers. As Kevin Hillstrom drills into our heads on his blog MineThatData, promotions and discounts can have a long-term harmful impact on your bottom line. Continually measuring the lifetime value and profit margin of discount buyers, especially from Q4, against customers that buy at full price will give you better understanding on the true dollar value of discount/Q4 customers to your company.
• Impact of loyal customers receiving gifts. (You have identified your loyal customers already, yes?) The ideal case would be that the gift causes a perfect opportunity for the customer to purchase complementary products or tie them into your brand further. However, it could be that the customer decides to spend their money elsewhere because they are satisfied with what they received and choose instead to buy apps for their new iPad, for instance. To help combat the potential dip in revenue from these customers, you can request that gift givers check a box at checkout and provide the name and/or email address of the recipient so that you can match up with your database to send a drip campaign with upsells and cross-sells to those gift recipients (if the gift recipient opts-in to receive, of course).
• Impact of loyal customers giving gifts. Again, the ideal case is that the customer has talked up your brand and by giving your products as gifts, introduced new loyal customers to your brand. Keep an eye on purchases made by loyal customers during Q4 and, if you are capturing the recipient information, the corresponding return rate of both the loyal customer and their recipients.

Analysis is often neglected because we're moving at 1,000 miles a minute and the to-do list is piling up, but it is the most important factor in determining future success. All of the analysis I've proposed should be easily attainable through your email service provider (ESP), CRM database and analytics package.  Do you have any additional Q4 analysis you perform on your email program? If so, share below.

Kelly Lorenz
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto
@KNLorenz