The holiday season seems to creep-up on us, starting earlier with each year that passes. Have you started planning your holiday email campaigns yet? There’s no better time than now to set yourself up for success!
We created The Retailer’s Guide to the Galaxy Holiday Season to help retailers and merchants prepare for the busiest time of the year. This free guide includes the best examples of holiday email campaigns sent during Black Friday Day Cyber Monday 2016 + why we think they’re winners. Click the button below to get your guide today!
Email marketing is king among your channels for driving growth and increasing engagement. In fact, no other channel is able to produce the same return on spend that email can. According to Custora Email marketing was the biggest driver of Black Friday transactions, with 25.1% of sales originating from the marketing channel.
To help you improve engagement and grow revenue, the following are a curated selection of the email campaigns our experts recommend you run this holiday season:
6 Holiday Email Campaigns To Run This Season!
- Sales-holiday Specific Messages
This is probably the most obvious, and widely used type of email campaign to send during the holidays. Here’s some tips to make your event specific emails count:
- Target this shopping holidays that the most important to your business, based on their relevance to your customers.
- Plan to send emails before, during, and after to keep users engaged and informed.
- Send the right message on these days, at the right times, to the right customers! Remember, contextual relevance is suggested and welcome by customers.
- Gift-Giving Guide and Featured Collections
Give the gift of a gift giving guide this holiday season! Plan out your guides well in advance to ensure you have one for every major holiday and type of customer. Here’s how it can be done simply:
- Designing your holiday emails around a “Gift Guide” or “Curated Collection” is a simple way to help customers convert.
- Gift guides are eye-catching, and make it easy for holiday shoppers to find the perfect gift for that perfect someone.
- Pull your gift guide or collection together by segmenting products by: price, demographics, personal interests, or bestsellers
- Make it Personal
Personalized email campaigns win customers over big-time, and easy to execute based on data you’ve already been collecting:
- Personalization adds a human element to your campaigns, and is statistically proven to increase your open rates and email conversion rate.
- Keep it simple, but make an impact on consumers by creatively injecting personalization in your email.
- Get personal by leveraging your customer’s: interests, search behaviour, location information, device data, and purchase history, to craft the best messages.
- Create a Sense of Scarcity
Timing is everything during the rush of a big holiday sales days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For us, the movie “Jingle All The Way” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to mind. In which he desperately tries to procure the hottest action toy for his son for Christmas.
- Increasing sales during the holidays starts with increasing demand.
- Create a sense of urgency in your promotional emails, these can be quantity (for example: low inventory) or time based (for example: 8 hours left!).
- Use language to help you build demand. Words like “hurry”, “limited time”, or “ends soon” help to push customers to purchase.
- Cart Abandonment
No matter the time of year, when it comes to shopping cart abandonment the struggle is real.
The good news is, that by intelligently using your email marketing during the holidays, you can recover sales and capture that “abandoned” revenue:
- Reach out during the holidays to remind them of these items that they’ve previously added to cart but left behind – they could be potential gifts!
- Your emails should contain engaging content (product images, testimonials, CTAs) to convince shoppers to return, and complete their purchase
- Time-out your sending frequency. We recommend sending the first email within 24 hours, then following up after 72 hours if no previous action was taken.
- Start tracking your analytics and compiling data into a dashboard early in the season! This will help you optimize your emails in the future and improve performance.
- Post or Lapsed-Purchase Email
In the commerce world, these are typically known as “win back campaigns”, because you’re trying to win customers back. The holiday season might be the perfect time for you to reach out to previous customers who have dropped off your radar:
- Recent customers are more likely to repurchase from you!
- If it’s been awhile since they’ve purchased from you, remind them you exist but don’t be pushy.
- Offer them a “win-back” promotion to get them shopping with you again. It doesn’t need to be a discount, even free-shipping or free gift-wrapping could suffice.
- Recommend other products to them, ones that are similar to what they’ve purchased from you before.
- Are they still browsing but not buying? Track your customers movement through your store, send them an email containing products that they’ve recently viewed.
Start Now!
Remember, consumers are going to be overwhelmed by holiday marketing messages this time of year, it pays to get creative in order to have your brand seen.
According to research by Litmus retailers increase their email frequency to their subscribers by roughly 50% during November and December, compared to other months. That’s A LOT of messages for you to plan out, and for shoppers to consume.
Download your free copy of The Retailer’s Guide to the Galaxy Holiday Season to get ahead of your holiday email campaign planning, now:
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