Kim Stiglitz Courvoisier, director of content marketing at Campaign Monitor, shares her best tips for creating an effective email marketing campaign during the festive season.
With shoppers expected to spend in excess of £700m online on Christmas Day, it is the prime season for businesses to take advantage of those last-minute shoppers. With an astonishing 4,300% ROI and $43 generated for every $1 spent, according to a US Direct Marketing Association report, email marketing is the most successful channel for achieving this. We’ve collected tome tips to help you make the most of your festive email marketing campaigns.
Save the date
Let’s take a step back. It may sound obvious, but being unprepared for the year’s most important holiday dates could derail your marketing campaign. And while Christmas and New Years’ will fall on the same days each year, you’ll be pleased to know these aren’t the only ones.
December is an especially busy month with Winter Solstice (December 21), Hanukkah (December 24) and Kwanzaa (December 26) all within a few days of each other so be sure to target everyone on your customer base to maximise sales potential.
Plan your work, then work your plan
You might not want to send out emails for every holiday, so target the ones most relevant to your market and that will drive the most revenue. Planning is crucial as it allows you to co-ordinate content, personalise offers and create visuals specifically for each holiday. Draw up a well executed plan, and then let automation do the work for you.
Automaton is key
With 49% of companies now using marketing automation, it has become an integral part of marketing strategy for businesses. Manually creating and sending emails to your customers the day before running a Christmas sale is a burdensome task and it will certainly not reap the best results.
Automation tools allow you to manage your campaign so you can send multiple emails to customers in the lead up to Christmas to the right people, at the right time, and at the right frequency. Automation tools make it much easier to plan a schedule of festive emails, indicating different special offers, discounts and promo codes, and increasing the frequency as the day draws closer.
Presentation
Tailor the visual specifically for the product you are marketing. Start by making your emails closely resemble your website to achieve consistency across all digital platforms and adapt the imagery, text and colour to best suit your brand. And regardless of sector, always put consideration into the subject header – as those initial seconds that grab your customer’s attention are absolutely key.
Be personalised
It pays to be personal at Christmas and all year long. Research has found that a personalised subject line will make it 26% more likely that your email will be opened. So it comes with no surprise that 75% of enterprises planned to invest in personalised messaging in 2016.
There is no better time to utilise the data you’ve collected from your customer base over the past year. You should use the information you have, including – what they’ve purchased, when they purchased it, and what they are likely to want to purchase in future. Moreover, personalising your emails will make the recipient feel like the message has been created specifically for them. And who doesn’t like to feel special, especially as this time of year?
And to wrap-up
With 68% of online shopping carts filled, and then abandoned, there are plenty of opportunities for you to send email reminders to your customers about the products that may still be lying untouched in their shopping carts. The post-Christmas break in the lead up to the new year is a great time to re-engage with your customers, as the January sales are just around the corner…
By Kim Stiglitz Courvoisier
Director of content marketing
Campaign Monitor