If your site is down and you send out an email, does anyone see it?

The answer is yes, and shame on you. I'm most likely not going to go back and click again on the emails up for insult today because I don't plan on monitoring when the sites will be available, not to mention how buried those emails will be by the time I remember that there was a sale with a pretty hefty discount. There goes your revenue stream. Best part? It happened twice. I received an Ann Taylor email, clicked through to their "down for maintenance" website, then received an email from Loft, Ann's younger, more casual sister, clicked through (mostly out of curiosity) to their "sorry for the inconvenience, check back soon" website. At the very least, the websites had pretty splash pages instead of broken images or blank pages, but still a bad user experience.

Side note: The leak strategy topic has come up a lot lately around the water cooler, and now I'm skeptical that any mistakes are real, although I can't really see the added benefit of this type of mistake. Bad press is bad press. If I'm understanding the concept right, you want, at the bare minimum, a neutral mistake, one that doesn't reflect poorly on your brand, but gets people talking about you via all the major social channels. The goal there is to get a message to go viral and watch acquisition and engagement increase on your email program. Side-side note: Make sure you have a somewhat well-rounded email program in place for this. "Batch and blasts" only work in the short term, and all your effort will be for a spike that you can't repeat until next year -- read "these don't make an impact if you do them all the time."

Holiday Emails: Too Soon?

I'm not going to tell you when's the best time to start sending holiday messages, but I will share my experience with one of my more visited websites, Land of Nod. I receive their catalog now, too, which is somewhat bothersome to me because A) I never requested this, and B) it's a waste of paper. But just the same, I received my first holiday email of the 2011 season from LOD on 9/27 with the subject line "We're getting decked out." While this was a pretty email, well branded and with a nice layout, I couldn't help but question if it was a mistake. I mean, September? We have yet to do the Halloween costume bit and Turkey dance. And here they are, boldy expressing love for their new ornaments and tree skirts. If it was a leak strategy, they were missing the "shh, don't tell anyone, but we're doing X" part. It was strange and, frankly, felt out of place, especially here in California with the sun shining and remnants of summer still in the air.

So how soon is too soon? I'm expecting some early bird holiday messaging to start trickling in in the next week or so and definitely by the beginning of November. To get a jump on your competitor, you should be collecting data on when they started their holiday campaigns over the last few years and send yours a week sooner. Or maybe you don't beat them to the punch, but you recognize the need to stand out, so you change up the creative to be less traditional red and green and more like the above. A clever subject line wouldn't hurt either. Try not to do the over done "Twas the night before Christmas" rhyme. I can't begin to tell you how so fifteen years ago that is.