There’s still plenty of autumn days left, but you can already feel the holiday season approaching. And while you might think that you still have plenty of time to launch your holiday email marketing campaign, the truth is that the time to prepare is now!
Don’t forget about past years!
New strategies years after year can become challenging for many businesses and they become afraid of seasonal promotions. But they forget about the most resource available: data collected from previous years.
The easiest and most crucial step in your marketing strategy is to look at past campaigns to see how well they performed. This is vital for better executing your campaigns in 2017, but also a huge advantage established businesses have against new ones.
By analyzing previous years, you can better understand your customer’s behavior, you can see what kind of holiday emails were the most successful and when they received the highest conversions.
Understanding your data and being on point with current trends will save you time in planning and help you predict what will work best for this holiday season.
Understand your customers!
It’s easy to get so involved with your holiday email campaign that sometimes you’ll forget the most important thing: your customer.
But no matter how exciting the elements in your emails, if your core message doesn’t resonate with your target audience, all that effort will go to waste.
That’s why the one golden rule for email marketing will remain this: understand your customer needs first.
Aesthetics are important, but even more important is delivering content that your subscribers want. The simplest way to achieve this is with personalized content.
By simply using the data you already have, you can see a tremendous increase in the reach of each and every email you send out.
Grab their attention!
The attention span of your customers is shrinking every year. That’s why grabbing their attention immediately is what you need to focus on most.
And the best opportunity for that is through an enticing subject line. Your subject lines need to be eye-catching, but if your goal is to be noticed, usually the best approach is to simply be different. Largely, you should be driven by what your competition is not doing.
Another way to make sure that your emails grab attention is to use interactive elements to enhance your messages and make them more eye-catching, because, in the end, it doesn’t matter how good your offer is, if no one ends up seeing it.
Excitement is the key!
Boring emails that do the same thing over and over again are doomed to fail eventually, no matter how successful the campaigns might have been initially.
Luckily, new ways of engaging your audience are becoming available each year. Making your emails more exciting and fresh, even in minor ways, can help you stand out and form a more positive image in the eyes of your audience.
Something that has the potential to be big during this holiday season is the use of gamification in emails. Basically, you can use interactive games that encourage friendly competition within the email list members. This type of strategy can help skyrocket open rates and generate buzz or even go viral.
Say Thank You!
It’s easy to get immersed in data and metrics, behind every email address is an actual person with whom you have been sharing and interacting throughout the year. It’s a good idea to take a moment to show your appreciation, especially during the holiday season.