The holiday season is the most anticipated time of the year for email marketers. As shoppers go crazy buying gifts for themselves and their loved ones, the demand for email marketing campaigns stays at an all-time high. As a business owner, you must position yourself firmly in advance to make the most of the holiday season. And you need a robust holiday email marketing strategy to reach your target audience and engage them with lucrative offers well in advance.
As we approach the busiest holiday shopping period of the year, it’s time to gear up and capitalize on the opportunity. If you want to run a successful holiday email campaign, now is the time to get your strategy in motion for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year, and sporadic holiday shopping sprees in the middle. In this article, we help you plan holiday email campaigns on time and share useful tips for building a successful email campaign.
What are the Benefits of Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns?
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies for generating leads, reaching out to patrons, and converting prospects into customers. Here are the most astounding benefits of running a holiday email marketing campaign:
Increase Sales Figures
You can make the most of customers’ heightened spending habits by curating special offers, providing discounts and free shipping, and promoting holiday-themed products and services. Holiday marketing emails are pretty effective in the weeks leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday since subscribers expect to hear from their favorite brands and receive the latest offers.
Higher Customer Engagement
Holiday email campaigns let you interact with subscribers on a personal level. You can leverage the festive spirit to create themed content to better connect with the audience. This allows brands to strengthen their bond with customers, generate loyalty, and improve customer engagement and conversion rates.
Potential to Reengage Cold Leads
Every business has inactive subscribers and cold leads waiting for the right re-engagement campaign. The holiday season is the best time to approach new customers and patrons who haven’t purchased from you in a while. However, contacting inactive users can affect your email deliverability score. Don’t neglect to follow all deliverability best practices to protect your sender reputation.
Generate Loyalty
Targeted holiday emails provide the perfect opportunity to reward loyal customers with exclusive deals, discounts, and early bird offers. Use your holiday email campaign to generate loyalty among patrons and encourage repeat business.
Simple Guide to Timing Holiday Email Marketing
Before delving into the details, we want to clarify there is no universal perfect time for your holiday email schedule. The timing varies for industries, brands, and your business goals. However, these significant factors can help you plan the right emailing schedule. Let’s walk you through the details.
Focus on Your Most Loyal Patrons
eCommerce businesses need to create an email list based on customers’ purchase habits. So, for your holiday email marketing campaign, you can send messages to clients based on how long they take to make the decision to buy from your business. Then wait for a week before sending a follow-up email. For example, if the buying cycle is typically one to two weeks during Christmas, you can run your email series between December 4th and 11th.
Evaluate Customers’ Buying Habits
Your customers need to navigate the sales funnel to complete a transaction. So, make sure the process is streamlined. Focus on email campaigns targeting customers at various stages of the buyer’s funnel. You can create product awareness campaigns, highlight the products’ benefits for customers, and offer a sweet deal they cannot refuse.
Create a Post-purchase Email Series
While generating sales is the primary goal of promotional emails, your holiday email strategy must include follow-up messages to gather customer feedback and improve relationships with patrons. Post-holiday emails help you generate sales in the future. You can add a limited-time incentive to motivate patrons to buy from you.
Email is the Best Holiday Marketing Tool
Here are the main reasons email marketing is the most effective marketing tool during the holiday season:
You Can Offer Exclusive Last-minute Deals
Email marketing campaigns work best during the holiday season, as last-minute shoppers wait to take advantage of exclusive deals. Shopping during holiday sales is more fun as it triggers instant buying decisions. Email marketing influences instant purchase decisions with calls to action like “Buy Now” or “Countdown Begins”.
Emails are Accessible on Mobile Devices
The popularity of online shopping skyrocketed in the past few years. A majority of holiday shoppers today browse from smartphones and tablets. As emails are more accessible on mobile devices than desktops, using a mobile-friendly holiday email template allows marketers to drive sales by sending the right message at the right time.
Personalized Emails Boost Engagement
Unlike print or social media and other marketing channels, emails have a greater potential for personalization. You can customize a holiday campaign according to your email subscribers’ likes, interests, and preferences and improve open and click-through rates. Whether you plan to run an email campaign for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, or New Year, personalized emails can help improve sales figures.
Holiday Campaigns Attract More Traffic
The holiday season brings sales numbers up as people buy gifts for themselves and their loved ones. This is the ideal time to attract new leads and re-engage customers with personalized gift ideas. Since time is of the essence here, your patrons don’t have the luxury to sit on your offers. So, if you send the right message at the right time, your chances of converting prospects into customers increase drastically.
5 Tips for Building the Best Holiday Email Campaigns
Now that you understand the importance of timing, let’s explore some proven holiday email marketing tips to increase sales figures.
Start Scheduling Emails Now
A well-planned email marketing campaign takes time to execute. By starting now, you ensure all elements fall in place by the time you need to launch it. While some of the work can be rushed, you must take your time with others. Starting your campaign earlier gives you plenty of time to A/B test your holiday email subject lines, body copy, images, and products. In short, there is no time like the present to start working on your holiday email marketing campaigns.
Provide Discounts and Offers
Customers have a lot of shopping to do during the holiday season, which means they are on the lookout for the best deals. Take your time to identify your business’ sweet spot for offering discounts and maximize your revenue potential by sending holiday promotions to all your subscribers. Your sweet spot might not always be a dollar discount, but value deals such as buy one get one or free shipping. You can also offer gift cards to customers purchasing goods over a specific dollar value. Also, consider rewarding buyers with early-bird promotions to boost sales initially.
Feature Your Best-selling Holiday Gift Ideas
One of the most effective email marketing strategies is to build on a product that works. This includes promoting your best-selling products during the holiday shopping season to maximize revenue. You may think that spending your ad budget on a product that is already selling well is a bad investment. However, there are two reasons why this strategy makes sense. For starters, success builds on itself. So, promoting successful items can increase your sales figures substantially. Second, by adding popular items to your email campaign, you increase your chances of generating revenue, even if customers don’t like the less popular products.
Use Attractive Holiday-themed Creatives
Sometimes, marketing is all about the visuals. So, it only makes sense to decorate your holiday email marketing campaign with relatable aesthetics. Shopping during the holidays can be stressful. So, consider lightening the mood by sprucing up the subject line, body copy, and email design.
Add Personal Touches to Your Emails
Your customers like honesty. The holiday season is the perfect time to get real with patrons. What form that takes will depend on your brand and industry. You can incorporate personal appeals with user-generated content, reviews, and testimonials, or add a note from the CEO. Feel free to experiment with the copy and design and test the results to see what works best for your business.
Launch Your Next Holiday Email Marketing Campaign with Expert Guidance
The holiday season presents a golden opportunity for businesses to maximize their email marketing efforts. With increased consumer spending and heightened engagement, your well-timed and carefully crafted email campaigns can significantly boost sales, customer loyalty, and engagement. From offering exclusive deals to using personalized content, each element plays a crucial role in ensuring the success of your campaigns.
Now is the perfect time to start planning and implementing your holiday email marketing strategy. Book a discovery call today to learn how the experts at Email Industries can help boost your efforts.
Marketing at Email Industries