With the holidays quickly approaching, shoppers are more willing to spend money than usual. Holiday shopping remains among some of the most profitable business seasons, from buying gifts for loved ones to various decorations or ushering in a new year with new things.
However, with email providers and operating systems adopting more stringent mail privacy protection, businesses will find it harder to get emails into the inboxes of their subscribers and potential consumers. It may become even more challenging to monitor your advertising effectively if email providers change how they analyze open and click-through rates.
However, this does not imply you should stop email marketing. Instead, it’s a chance to improve your holiday email campaign efforts in ways that will amaze your customers. Please continue reading to learn five key email marketing strategies to boost your company’s holiday sales.
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5 Email Campaigns for the Upcoming Holiday Season
#1 Time Your Campaign Well
The holiday season campaign is a targeted marketing campaign that leverages the celebratory season to create the emotion that triggers people to make purchases. The holiday time is one of the best seasons to market your wares and services to potential customers. Preferably, such campaigns must run a few days before the holiday season. And as the big day approaches, you must multiply your marketing efforts. However, several firms are unsure how to plan and execute an email campaign. If you fall under this category, you may consider hiring a campaign manager to maximize your sales this holiday season.
While there is no pre-set formula, creating a chronology for your campaigns can be your safe bet. The first campaign you must leverage as the year begins to close is the Halloween campaign. Halloween campaigns may involve your ideas to flow around the theme of horror. For instance, a simple ‘treat offer’ to your customers can do the trick for you.
Similarly, you can plan ‘Black Friday or November sales.’ Black Friday is, more often than not, the Friday preceding Thanksgiving. On this day, people make many purchases to avoid the rush associated with the eve of Thanksgiving. Nothing speaks Black Friday like crazy discounts, so your campaigns must favor deals and ‘order before date’ theme.
Alternatively, sending out e-mails, holiday discounts, and coupon codes during Thanksgiving can be a way for marketers to create re-purchases from existing clients.
At last, you can deploy an effective marketing campaign during Christmas and New Year, ensuring that all your e-mails reach your buyers with well-curated offers.
#2 Keep it simple
Text-based emails are easier to write and send. Moreover, concise messages are more likely to make it to the recipient’s primary inbox, where they will be opened and read.
Plain-text communications are less likely to be screened by email service providers and routed to a secondary mailbox or, worse, the spam bin.
Emails with complex HTML and picture elements are frequently tagged as promotions, social media alerts, or spam. Therefore, they are filtered from the primary inbox and stay unread.
If you must include custom HTML and photos in your emails, keep them short and to the point. Use exciting image wherever you can. The image might be a banner advertising a holiday deal or promotion. Alternatively, you can choose shopping photos from your eCommerce site with products that lead to your product pages.
Also, it’s vital to include a clear call to action, such as checking out a current promotion, browsing the holiday collection, or learning how to mail products from the company as a gift to loved ones.
#3 Maximize the preview text
The preview text is an important feature that comes with email services. It comprises the first few lines of text that an email recipient sees. It reveals to the email recipients what’s in store for them before they click on the email. Therefore, you can use a preview text to persuade recipients to open your email.
You can take advantage of this by creating an interesting holiday color theme or offering in an email preview. An engaging preview can significantly affect customer engagement by giving the messaging more character and urgency, such as holiday deals. Customers tend to respond to email previews they find interesting positively.
Most email marketing companies let you modify the preview text when developing your campaigns. However, if yours doesn’t allow you to edit it, ensure your first lines of text in the campaign are the message you’d like to use as your preview text. Also, ensure that your e-mails are optimized for all devices because you never know what device your prospective customer will use.
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#4 Hyper-personalize by segmenting your audience
Hyper personalization is an important feature that can help your company achieve more success with holiday email campaigns. This approach entails audience segmentation, which splits users into several categories according to their demographics, interests, and purchasing patterns.
When gathering critical data, you can personalize marketing content and resources to a specific target, increasing engagement and overall income. An email will thus only contain material that the receiver would find interesting or pertinent.
Here’s a good illustration.
If your store supplies goods for men and women, you should send tailored emails to each gender featuring goods from particular catalogs. A lady subscriber may receive products from your women’s collection. Alternatively, you can send them products from the male collection to encourage them to purchase gifts for their male family members and friends.
You can also personalize according to previous purchases and frequency. For instance, if a consumer is known to buy or rebuy specific products, like product refills, you might send them a promotion for this product or one from its product catalog.
#5 Make it feel urgent
Creating a sense of urgency for consumers to buy or sign up for a particular service is a successful email marketing approach. It makes them feel like they could be missing out. This would work particularly well if you have a holiday offer or discount.
The trick to making it work, though, is avoiding coming out overly pushy. One effective strategy is to propose a time-sensitive offer. It could be a bargain, a limited-edition product, or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You can also create a unique holiday code that customers may use sitewide.
Adopting a time-limited holiday email campaign can boost consumer engagement and raise click-through rates. When people believe they are running out of time, they are more likely to take advantage of the offer quickly before it ends.
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Advantages of Holiday Email Campaigns
1. Emails allow you to deliver customized messages
Businesses can communicate with their consumers through numerous platforms, including emails and social media networks. However, emails provide better opportunities for sending individualized messages. Emails provide multiple personalization options, ranging from using the person’s initial name in the subject line to making product suggestions depending on the person’s purchasing history.
Emails have also been proven to be the most effective technique for nurturing leads. Research indicates that over 31% of B2B marketers feel that email newsletters are the most effective approach to nurturing leads. Therefore, your business can benefit from designing quality holiday newsletters and sending them to your subscribers.
Here are some ideas for personalizing your emails.
- Determine the various emails you’ll use over the holiday season. By doing this, you’ll be able to provide them with relevant articles and offers.
- In your email, employ a wide range of customization strategies. These strategies include addressing the recipient by their first name and using their name in the subject line. You can use dynamic content depending on your clients’ geographic and demographic information to tailor the email body text and product photos. Ensure that the subject line is compelling or reflects your offer.
- Advanced personalization strategies include offers based on consumer behavior data, VIP specials for loyal customers, and product suggestions based on recent buying patterns.
2. They minimize cart abandonment
Not every customer who visits your product or checkout page purchases your goods. Shoppers leaving their carts abandoned is a common problem for many retailers. It is particularly prevalent during the holiday season due to the wide range of options and alternatives available to customers,
Holiday email campaigns are essential for minimizing cart abandonment and increasing sales conversions. Cart abandonment emails are known to have excellent open and conversion rates. Research indicates that conversion and email open rates have increased tremendously over the past five years. These consistently high percentages suggest businesses can recover a substantial amount of their lost revenues.
3. Email is the most effective marketing technique
You can use emails to regularly send discounts, offers, and other promotion-based content to your existing clients, subscribers, and prospective consumers. Emails can also invite subscribers to different holiday activities and contests.
Emails are a powerful marketing tool that businesses can use to distribute promotional materials like gift suggestions or recipe books. If the promotion lasts several days, you can send emails to your subscribers to share the promotions of the day. The opportunities for businesses using email marketing campaigns are limitless. Therefore, you can significantly increase revenue and engagement when you use emails effectively.
How to Know if Your Email Campaign is Successful?
How can you tell whether your holiday email marketing strategies are effective? Typically, we use metrics like open, click-through, and conversion rates to monitor your progress.
Remember that not every email marketing strategy will perform as well as anticipated. Therefore, it’s crucial to test emails that are most effective in increasing conversion rates, click-throughs, registrations, and sign-ups.
Email marketing testing is an essential component of the marketing process since it helps optimize engagement rates and expenses.
You can try the following in your active email campaigns:
- Calls to action
- Images
- Preview text
- Content length
- Email subject lines
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The Bottom Line
A holiday email marketing campaign effectively connects with your target market, generates revenue, and establishes your brand.
A successful holiday email marketing campaign begins with a comprehensive plan that includes defined goals and precise actions with calls to action. It would then need to be integrated with a reliable, well-designed website that offers a smooth purchasing experience for customers.
Remember, during holidays, every entrepreneur is working towards reaching the same target audience. Therefore, to ensure that you stand out, you must have a very beneficial value proposition that keeps your customers glued to your e-mail. Your email marketing campaign can increase sales over the holidays if you effectively practice the abovementioned strategies.
Resources
- https://www.statista.com/topics/4481/personalized-marketing/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2022-02-15/64-of-marketers-believe-apple-s-mail-privacy-protection-will-forever-change-email-marketing-according-to-getapp
- https://ascend2.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Ascend2-Email-Marketing-Strategy-Survey-Summary-Report-160908.pdf
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351917481_The_Effectiveness_of_Triggered_Email_Marketing_in_Addressing_Browse_Abandonments