8 email marketing tips for driving sales this holiday season
From Click Frenzy to Singles’ Day, Halloween to Black Friday, Cyber Monday to Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s Eve, these landmark events provide a great opportunity for marketers to increase brand awareness and drive sales. Here are some of my quick tips for sales-driving seasonal email marketing:
1. Launch a competition to kick-start your seasonal email marketing
Competitions are great for data capture. Come up with a fantastic prize and encourage your recipients to give you certain details – such as preferences – when they enter. This data can then be used to better segment and target your seasonal email marketing in the future.
2. Remember your seasonal audience
Before launching straight into your seasonal email marketing, think very carefully about whether the event you’re promoting is likely to interest your recipients. If you’re a unisex brand and have a list made up of young men, running a ‘how to look glamorous at your Christmas party’ campaign won’t be particularly effective. Remember to always tailor the message as per the segment you’re targeting, including products and promotions that relate back to the characteristics of the audience.
3. Don't be too contrived
Don’t just email for the sake of it. Make sure you have something relevant and valuable to say. We know it can be hard during the holidays to be unique, and not send promotion after promotion like everybody else. A great example is Beer Cartel’s yearly beer advent calendar. This gives them a reason to email, plus follow up with customers who purchased it the year before.
4. Plan your seasonal marketing well in advance
It’s important to think about your emails far enough in advance to really make the most of the opportunity, rather than just a knee-jerk response that isn’t well thought through. Use this email marketing planner to structure and schedule your email programs, before the season gets too hectic.
5. Don't forget the basics
It’s tempting just to let the event or season speak for itself, but don’t forget some of the basics of good email marketing, from split-testing to segmentation and targeting. Make sure you don’t miss our email essentials series to get you started.
6. Run time-based offers
Why not run a special discount or offer to coincide with the event or sale day? For example, Caruso’s Natural Health targeted the Singles’ Day (November 11) holiday last year. They used dotdigital’s recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) value model and dashboards to run a strategic marketing campaign offering pre-launch discounts for loyal customers.
7. Have something for everyone
Remember that not everyone is a fan of Halloween or Black Friday. Try and offer something for everyone or, even better, segment your list based on responses to previous campaigns. If a batch of recipients responded well to a Thanksgiving-related email in the past, then send them more of the same next time round.
8. Build a campaign-specific landing page
Maximise conversions once your recipients have clicked-through by putting together a campaign-specific landing page on your website. Whether it’s a VIP Black Friday sign-up or a seasonal promotional page, landing pages are great for driving customer action.
I hope these eight tips help you plan for your seasonal email marketing this year.
