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How to Plan for the Success of Your Holiday Email Marketing Strategy
Well, its almost December again. And that means that its time for Christmas and the holiday season. And businesses all over are looking for some great ways to get more customers and boost sales. However, due to high competition in the traditional marketing avenues like social media means that these brands have a hard time standing out and being memorable.
In these times, its better to go for techniques that are a bit more unorthodox, like direct marketing via SMS, or by holiday email marketing campaigns. Now, it doesn’t matter if you are a newly established business, or a well-established one. In either case, the result of introducing a holiday email marketing strategy into your marketing plans will help you boost business by a lot, as well as help you stand out from the competition successfully.
But how can using something as simple as holiday email marketing help us boost our business this much? What is it about this mode of marketing that professional branding services are hired to implement and run it for large corporations?
Let’s read on and discover how an email marketing plan can help your business grow, and how to use it to help your business attract customers during the holiday shopping season.
Why Is Holiday Email Marketing Such An Important Tool for Businesses?
When it comes to marketing during the holiday season, businesses use a variety of holiday marketing ideas to stand out and boost their sales during the season. Now, one of those ideas is the use of a holiday email marketing strategy to help your existing marketing strategy improve its impact. but how does it do that?
As we all know, each marketing channel has its own pros and cons. For the most part, social media marketing is considered the king, especially if you have an established and interactive following. However, during the holiday season, most consumers are overwhelmed with the amount of ads they are exposed to each day, as each brand looking to outdo its competition.
That results in a state of fugue, where the consumers see the ads, yet they fail to retain or remember anything of importance from it. Therefore, if that is what a business relies on solely, they are going to miss out on getting that consumer’s sale.
To counter this, businesses sometimes rely on email marketing. This marketing channel allows for a more personal touch, while at the same time it allows for a more memorable experience. Moreover, holiday email marketing helps your marketing strategy in many other ways, such as:
Promotes Mobile Shopping
Firstly, most people view their personal emails on their phone rather than on their computers. By using email marketing, the brand promotes mobile-first buying, as consumers can directly go to their site via the email’s call-to-action. Therefore, you need to modify your email templates for the mobile, and use them with seasonal themes to attract users into visiting your site. This is quite important in high volume shopping events, which makes it quite popular among Black Friday marketing strategies.
Offers Ease of Buying for Consumers
Emails offer an interesting medium for marketers, as they allow for far more functionality than social media. Now, as these holiday sales events often come with amazing discounts, marketers can use emails to make the shopping experience more enjoyable and profitable, triggering an instant buying reaction. Businesses can also add “Buy Now”, “Add to Cart”, or even a countdown timer in emails to heighten the shopping experience, and increasing conversion. This can be quite useful for events like Christmas or Hanukkah, making it a great addition to Christmas marketing ideas.
Boosts Engagement Due to Personalization
Social media posts, while quick and easy to reach a large number of your target consumers, lack one very critical element – personalization. Consumers want brands that connect with them, especially those that stand out by taking the time to reach out to them. In this case, emails are an important medium, as they allow for a greater degree of personalization, which helps to increase brand loyalty.
Increases Site Traffic
Finally, email marketing help increase site traffic more than other mediums, especially during the holidays. In addition, the degree of conversion via email means that most of that traffic is able to convert, meaning a high ROI. Your brand’s email campaigns can target leads such as those with abandoned carts, and convince them into finalizing their purchase. Moreover, it can also target those who have previously bought something perishable from your site, by sending them emails about that item if in stock.
What Types of Emails Can Be a Part of Your Holiday Email Marketing Strategy?
So far, we have established that adding a holiday email marketing strategy to your wider brand marketing plan is a great way to boost business during the holiday season. However, you might be wondering, especially if you are new to the subject, as to what type of emails should you create and send to consumers.
Well, your campaign should include multiple types of marketing emails, and each should be used according to its purpose. For example, you would not send an email that is designed to convert a hot lead to a consumer who has just visited your website for the first time.
Therefore, let’s take a look at the various types of emails you should include within your holiday email marketing campaign.
Welcome/Greeting Emails
Welcome emails are a very critical part of your holiday email marketing strategy. It defines the tone of the relationship between your business and that consumer. These emails impact your CLV, or customer lifetime value.
You can use these email to welcome them to the website, and convince them into visiting your website again. You can also promote any discounts, stock updates, hot items, and even upcoming sales. The design of these emails needs to be simple, to boost visibility and legibility. Moreover, the logo should be clear and placed at the top, to help consumers associate and remember your brand.
Moreover, you can add a newcomer discount voucher or incentives like giveaways or bonuses on first purchase over a set limit. Overall, it is an important and necessary part of your strategy.
Promotional Emails
Promotional emails are the next step of the email marketing campaign. Now you have got consumers who are aware of and visit your site regularly. However, with a sales event coming up, you need to get these consumers on your side before they are ensnared by another brand’s marketing.
Promotional emails are an especially important part of your holiday email marketing plan, as it allows you to target consumers in different ways. Generally, your promotional emails would include things like sales announcements, hot items that season, shipping details, gift card offers, and prominently placed customer support contact details. This type of email is a great way to round off a simple email marketing campaign, and is often used as a central part of your thanksgiving marketing ideas.
Abandoned Cart Conversion Emails
Whether its during normal shopping, or it is during the holiday season, many consumers abandon their carts after adding one or more items. Now this could be due to a myriad of reasons. Sometimes the consumer loses interest in the brand, while other times they abandon it when distracted by something else to do. Or it could be something wrong with the user experience.
In that case, you can send that consumer a polite cart reminder. However, you also need to assume that there was something wrong with the experience, and look for the problem to solve it. Common issues could include:
- Shipping cost too high
- Found a better sale
- Majority of desired items were out of stock
Now, if you have managed to identify and address the issue in question, you can proceed with your abandoned cart reminder email.
6 Top Tips to Help Your Holiday Email Marketing Strategy Increase Its Sales
So, now we know that holiday email marketing is a blast to implement in our marketing strategy. However, it requires a bit of finesse and experience to create the perfect email marketing strategy, which may mean that the resultant strategy is not as well received or successful.
However, a holiday email marketing strategy can bolstered through some ways. Let’s take a look at some of these tips and tricks to help you ensure a successful email marketing campaign.
Segment Consumers and Send Promotional Emails Accordingly
Many businesses, especially larger eCommerce businesses, can have multiple target demographics that they serve. That means that a single promotional email may not work well for all consumers, especially considering that emails are expected to be more personalized.
However, a great way to counteract that is to segment your target market, based on a number of factors, and create promotional emails according to those segments. This is highly useful in events like Halloween, where you use this combined with other Halloween marketing ideas to target consumers according to their needs. Your segmentation factors can include:
- Interests of the consumers. This segment can be made using liked products, history of buying these products, or buying something related to them.
- Type of shopper. Some consumers patronize your business the whole year round, while others only visit during a major sales event. You can boost the conversion of the former with things like loyalty bonuses, and the latter with sales coupons and discount promotions.
- Savings lovers. Some consumers are price-sensitive and only shop during the high sales season. You can target these consumers with limited time coupons and discounts.
Automate Your Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns
Just like many other marketing operations nowadays, you can also automate your email marketing activities. Email automation is a versatile and comprehensive tool in a marketer’s arsenal, which can be used to reach your loyal consumers at the right time. Moreover, this can be quite helpful during the holiday season, as it takes a lot of redundant load off of the marketer.
Some of the more popular ways to use email automation include:
- Establishing abandoned cart workflows. You can automate the process of sending emails to consumers who have abandoned their carts midway through the shopping session.
- Target and convert warm leads using lead scoring. You can automate the task of ranking leads who are more likely to buy your products, by tracking their behavior. Moreover, you can also send them promo emails to gauge their interest.
- Send seasonal greetings. You can use email automation to send seasonal greetings to your consumers, especially the new ones. You can also include a voucher or inside your email, to get the ball rolling.
Add a Touch of Personalization to Your Holiday Email Marketing
As we mentioned earlier, personalization is the hallmark of a good email campaign, and what sets it apart from common marketing mediums like social media. Not only is it good, but it is also easy to personalize your marketing emails.
You can target consumers with their specific desired content, use a catchy and interesting subject, and even address the consumer by their first name. This will help you stand out from the competition, while drawing the attention of your consumers and hooking them in early before your competitors get to them.
Create and Share Gift Guides for the Holiday Shopping Season
Holiday gift guides are a great way to add value to your consumers’ shopping experience. Not only is it perceived as going above and beyond for the consumers, it also allows you to feature your products front and center.
Moreover, it can be a great way to upsell related products, which would otherwise have slipped the mind of your consumers had they not seen it on the gift guide. This way, you will lessen the stress on the shoppers, while increasing the satisfaction of the shopping experience by a huge percentage.
Make Your Emails Mobile Friendly to Boost Conversions
Finally, you need to make sure that the emails you send are optimized for mobile screens properly. The success of your holiday email marketing strategy is predicated on how well you have addressed the mobile-centric needs of your consumers.
By 2021, the share of eCommerce sales by mobile users was 40.4%, and that was only because most people were at home during the pandemic. However, the recent years has seen that number jump exponentially, with mobile phone users making up a sizable majority of eCommerce users. And as most people open their personal emails on their phone, it makes sense to optimize your emailer for the mobile devices.
Consider and Implement a Post-Holiday Email Campaign
Many brands go quite for a little while as soon as the major holiday season ends. This makes for a great time to capture a segment of the market that often goes ignored – the head of the household. Most households have their heads running around the holiday season looking for presents for their loved ones, or preparing for a number of other tasks during the holidays. And these consumers then miss out on the awesome holiday sales.
However, if you market a post-holiday email marketing campaign, you can target that demographic and convert them with relative ease. This technique from New Year’s marketing ideas will let you stand out magnificently, as well as get you consumers that are going to be highly loyal to your brand.
Conclusion
To sum it up, ensuring your holiday email marketing strategy is a success requires a lot of ingenuity and hard work. However, if you know your consumers, and understand the power of a good marketing email, then you can use the guide above to give your holiday email marketing the boost it needs.
Even if you have no prior experience working with holiday email marketing, this guide here can guide you on creating and optimizing one for your brand. So why wait? Start now!
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