The appeal of email marketing has always been top-notch to marketers. According to DMA’s Email Tracking Report, email receives more than 30 times the return on investment on average. That shows the significance of email pretty clearly.
Now, when it comes to the holiday season, naturally, the importance of email marketing becomes more intense. You can give a boost to your sales with a great email campaign this time.
Why Email Marketing Is Important
You can get benefited from any of the marketing channels if you can use them to their fullest potential. Email marketing is the best marketing channel when it comes to bringing a positive ROI. According to Litmus.com:
Email ROI is an impressive $36 for every $1 spent.
Here’s a short list explaining why you should run email campaigns for your holiday campaigns.
- Email marketing has a high ROI
- Emails are mobile-friendly and promote mobile shopping
- They offer instant buying options
- They’re easy to personalize
- They target prospective customers directly.
Let’s learn the best tips for Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns with a few examples of successful campaigns from the following section.
How to Boost Sales With Holiday Email Marketing
November-December is the time when consumers get into shopping more than any other month. So, marketers need to take advantage of it. Here are 15 ways you can craft your holiday email marketing to acquire more customers.
1. Plan early ahead of the holiday
Create a well-planned schedule ahead of your holiday season. Make sure your subscribers get advanced notice of your promotions. Remember, people tend to have their own shopping plans for holidays. An early approach can get you into that plan.
Don’t forget to check the reports of your past campaigns during planning. Figure out which worked and which didn’t and plan accordingly.
2. Segment your customer base
Your email marketing campaign success depends on proper audience segmentation. Sending emails to the people who really are interested in buying from you is a big challenge. Filter out these email recipients and nurture them for further steps.
Keep the following things in mind when segmenting your email list:
- Identify potential buyers based on their purchase history
- Find customers who browse the purchase section of your website
- Identify people who purchase only when they get discounts.
3. Focus on the Subject line
A creative subject line increases the chance of your email being opened. Use a line relevant to the holiday. Play with words to make it catchy.
The same theory goes for the preview texts as well. Try to make your reader smile with some simple but creative texts.
Look what Fossil did with the word-play in their Christmas email –
4. Incorporate visually appealing elements
If opened, your email only gets a 5-8 seconds window to deliver the message to the reader. So, include interactive elements in the mail body to buy some more time. Use GIFs, colors, or any other engaging elements carefully to retain the attention of the reader.
FoxFuel‘s Monkey Day campaign –
5. Feature real-time content
Integrating real-time changes in inventory or a countdown timer in an email can motivate people to take action. Since such contents create a sense of urgency among consumers, you can make use of it in your holiday email marketing.
Here’s a template from NiftyImages –
6. Don’t be annoying and too salesy
Each holiday season, people’s inbox literally gets flooded with promotional emails. So, take feedback from your customers. Ask whether they’d prefer to opt in or out of holiday-related emails and how often they’d like to receive them. Don’t end up annoying your loyal customers by only focusing on holiday sales.
TechRadar‘s email footer to collect user feedback –
7. Connect with the holiday theme
Try to make a subtle connection between the holiday-based theme and your email copy. This will create a good impression of your company among the consumers. Only a discount or an offer may not always suffice to increase sales. But a creative copy can do the job.
Can you beat UBER‘s Halloween-themed mail copy?
8. Personalize the emails for better conversions
Email is easier to personalize since you know who your recipient is. Give your emails a gentle touch of personalization, it will drive more conversions for sure. You can greet email receivers with their names to grab their attention. Even you can write a customized subject line for each customer to increase the conversion rate.
9. Leverage the power of gamification
People love to participate in games and contests. So, inserting small games or invitations for contests in your email is a great way to generate excitement among people. It also leads to word-of-mouth marketing. Why not utilize this in your holiday campaign too?
Email on Easter by EmailMonks –
10. Create urgency and apply the FOMO technique
People get more attracted to things that last for a short time. Let your customers know that they’ll be missing out on great opportunities if they don’t buy from you now. You can add a countdown timer or mention a limited timeframe to nudge them to make a buying decision. Instill fear of missing out in their minds in a subtle manner.
11. Optimize the campaign for mobile phones
The number of mobile internet users is increasing each year. According to Statista:
In 2021, the number of unique mobile internet users stood at 4.32 billion, indicating that over 90 percent of the global internet population use a mobile device to go online.
You can’t achieve success without targeting this amount of people. So, keep your holiday email campaigns suitable for mobile users to get the best outcomes. Run A/B test and send emails only when they appear nice on mobile screens.
12. Offer free shipping and special discounts
Buyers always want more from the sellers. You can offer something extra during holiday campaigns to attract your customers. Free shipping, special discounts, coupon codes, quizzes, and contests are a few ideas you can implement in your holiday campaigns. These special activities increase both engagement and sales.
13. Send automated emails
If you have a massive list of email recipients, automated emails can save a lot of manhours for you. Choose a tool that can send automated tools with a great extent of email customization. You can try weMail to run automated campaigns and send emails to a lot of people at once.
14. Test your campaign emails before sending
This is a must-follow step for everyone. No matter how well you prepare your emails, you can’t ignore a final check. Go through the email copy and design several times and test the outcome by sending a test email to your own emails. If everything looks good, then hit the send button finally.
15. Send follow-up emails (post-holiday)
It’s less likely that people will buy from you after the first time you approach them. So, send follow-up emails after the first email. You can also send post-holiday emails to prospective customers to guide them through the buying process.
Final Words
One size doesn’t fit all. Therefore, try to figure out which strategy works best for you. Implement and test new ideas on a regular basis. Change only one variable at a time so you can determine the catch. The holiday season is a busy time for email marketers no doubt. But managing some time to analyze the metrics and act according to them is a must for a successful campaign.
If you are using WordPress, then creating email campaigns, scheduling for perfect timing, and getting detailed reports – all these can be done with the Email Campaign plugin.
