As a consumer yourself, you are no doubt flooded with scads of marketing emails during the holiday season, so you know how much competition there is to grab consumer attention. As a business owner, this shouldn’t deter you from launching email marketing campaigns. Even if competition is tough, you still have to show up to compete.
However, you’ll definitely need to adjust your strategy during this time of year to break through to customers inundated by marketing communiques. What can you do to stand out from the pack, grab attention, and compel customers to take advantage of your holiday offers? Here are a few tips for successful holiday email marketing.
1. Start early
Cobbling together an email marketing campaign at the 11th hour is a recipe for disaster. If you want to come up with a strategy and content that will wow customers and deliver desired conversions, you really need to start planning early.
Successful holiday campaigns are in the early planning stages months ahead of time, giving marketing professionals ample opportunity to align campaigns with product launches, sales, and other pertinent events. It also leaves plenty of time for comparison with previous campaigns, testing, and tweaking well in advance of the actual launch.
2. Segment your campaign
Not all customers are created equal, and you’re going to need separate strategies to connect with different segments of your customer base. For example, different messaging may be needed to re-engage customers that haven’t shopped with you in a while, as opposed to loyal patrons that make frequent purchases from your brand.
You wouldn’t want to send a message to a recent shopper saying “we miss you” and offering a discount for returning, but this might help to bring back a customer that has migrated to the competition. Segmentation of email marketing engages different groups of customers in targeted ways to improve outcomes.
3. Personalize emails
Whether you add a name, discuss prior purchasing details, or recommend products customers might like based on past purchases, personalizing the experience can impress customers and make them feel like they’re more than just a number on your P&L statement.
4. Retarget
Over the holidays, consumers do a lot of window shopping, so to speak, and they may abandon carts full of items as they look for alternatives or better pricing elsewhere. Don’t let them get away so easily. As part of your holiday campaign, retarget them with email reminders of the items they left behind, as well as special promotions to encourage them to pull the trigger, or even alternative products they might prefer.
5. Mobile first
Optimizing your website for mobile browsing and shopping is a must, especially if you want to compete for top search engine rankings. However, you also need to consider the massive growth of mobile users when creating email marketing campaigns.
Emails must be responsive, which is to say, they must look as good on mobile devices as they do on a computer monitor. More and more consumers rely on mobile devices for the majority of their virtual interactions and activities. If you want to impress customers and create a successful holiday email marketing campaign, you cannot afford to ignore trends like mobile usage.
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