Sending holiday emails lets brands outperform their competitors by gathering more data on their customers’ spending habits, interests, preferences, and behaviors. This is due to the fact that a lot of businesses still don’t bother doing proper email marketing.
However, the best thing about holiday email marketing is that holidays are a perfect time for promotions because consumers are more open to new products being introduced to them. Some are even actively searching for what products to buy or what they should do for the holidays!
This means that sales rates and engagement levels are higher than the usual weekdays and weekends. Here are six email marketing strategies you should use to drive your business success by maximizing the season.
1. Make Smart Holiday Schedules
There are two common mistakes that a lot of businesses make when doing holiday email campaigns and these mistakes drive a drop in sales. One is to wait until the last minute, and the other is sending too many emails before the holiday shopping period.
Sending campaigns at the last minute would lead to fewer sales because customers have already made plans on how to spend their money on the holidays—on the other hand, sending too many emails before the shopping period would annoy users or cause email exhaustion resulting in the campaigns being ignored.
To make a smart happy holidays email campaign schedule, it is good to start first by creating product awareness. Send emails that show what goods are in store and what is coming to the list before the holidays. Write a newsletter of which products are ideal for gifts and which goods they can buy for decoration as well.
The next thing to do is to focus on product benefits and features. Tell your customers why the items you sell are better than your competitors and why you should buy them for the holidays. Explain why they should choose your services. Make it short, honest, and direct.
Lastly, offer incentives like different deals, discounts, vouchers, or coupons to influence a complete transaction. The goal is to balance your marketing by influencing your customer to buy your product without being pushy.
2. Target Campaigns Based on Segmentation Analysis
Segmentation makes email marketing and personalization easier. This is one of the factors that increase sales and engagement rates for all times of the year. Analyze your user’s activity patterns to determine the perfect time to send emails to them and know what they’re interested in.
You can also use their location and demographics as a reference for segmentation if you have no existing data about their interaction with their business. For example, know what timezone they live in so you can send your campaigns on hours in which they are active and free to read your emails.
3. Leverage Marketing Automation
After you’ve segmented your customers based on their demographics and behavior, automate sending emails with relevant content based on their segmentation. This saves you time and effort in delivering personalized emails instead of sending them manually.
This can be done by using the automation function, which is usually a feature of your marketing tool. If your customer has bought, added to cart, or searched for a specific product, set the automation tool to send promotion emails of the product or other related items based on the data are taken from their search history, purchase history, and abandoned cart.
By sending well-timed and highly relevant emails, you’ll increase the chances of users actually purchasing from your store because each one of them will feel that you treat them unique by selling them goods that they would want on times they’re comfortable with.
4. Focus on Email Content that Matches Holiday Themes
Themes are art, and they touch us on a personal level. Themes also drive human motivation and can even be used to influence buying decisions. Before composing your email content, make sure to add festive elements to the body of each email.
Use colors like white, red, and green in the email body to match the yuletide season. Also, you’ll be smart to Design borders of the newsletter with elements like chocolates and wine for Valentine’s Day or shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day.
5. Identify Strategies that Worked For Your Audience
The strategy that worked before for your audience will still work for the holiday campaigns. Analyze which element of your most successful campaigns drove the highest engagement and sales rates. It can be due to a witty subject line or the words and tone you’ve used in the email body. Whatever it is, use those elements again.
6. Point Customers to the “Buy Now” Button
The holidays make a busy bee out of everyone. Make sure that the buying process experience of all your customers is as smooth and convenient as possible. Each product promoted in an email body should have a buy now button so that users can make a purchase immediately after they have made their buying decision.
Final Thoughts
The email marketing strategies used on ordinary days, such as email scheduling, list segmentation, and email automation, are just as effective for the holidays. The only difference is that you, as an email marketer, should focus on the season’s festivities and make your customers’ buying experience as convenient as possible.
To do that, you should design your email body to be beautifully matched with the coming occasion and put a “buy now” button close to the product promotion to shorten your customers’ purchase process.
