It won’t be long before the year’s biggest holiday season is upon us, but the good news is there’s still some time left to prepare.
If you have seasonal promotions or special deals lined up, you’ll want to ensure customers are well aware of these offers with a standout email marketing campaign.
Here are a few tips to make the most of the holiday shopping season by ensuring your email campaigns are as effective as possible.
Invest in a catchy subject line
With so much competition at this time of year, cutting through the din of sale announcements and discount-driven messages is crucial. A stand-out and effective subject line will equip your campaign with the best chance of drawing a customer’s attention.
The most important step in crafting an effective subject line is to understand the customers’ context. With more than 54 per cent of consumers accessing their emails via mobile phones, it’s crucial to keep your subject lines mobile friendly by limiting them to 30 characters.
The modern customer will also be inundated with lots of emails, so it’s crucial to include your value proposition within the subject line. Whether it’s about special holiday content, limited offers, or how-to guides, make sure to encapsulate the email within the subject line.
Warm customers over time
Getting great deals on beloved brands is truly exciting, so make sure to leverage this in your warm-up strategy. Use all your channels to build the hype and tantalise customers with teaser campaigns hinting at what’s to come in the run up to the big day. Visuals play an integral part in attracting customer attention, so think about incorporating videos with valuable and engaging content that will keep shoppers hooked onto your brand.
Leverage data
It goes without saying that nurturing customers and building loyalty is important. However, if your goal is to close as many sales as possible this holiday season, you need to rack up customer conversions. Make sure your email marketing strategy is relevant and this will be the key deciding factor in the revenue race this year. For instance, leverage the data your ESP (email service provider) collects on your contact list will help you become the highlight of your customers’ inboxes.
Data is your most valuable asset as it provides insight into what customers are interested in and how to best target them. This enables you to personalise emails and landing pages with all kinds of information from gender and shopping interests to geographical location. Make use of dynamic content blocks to automatically display pertinent product images based on each customer’s web behaviour; include images and titles of previously purchased products to prompt reviews that will help other customers convert.
Rescue lapsed sales
Another key holiday season email marketing strategy is to follow up with customers who showed buying intent with a limited extension offer or other incentives such as free delivery or extra loyalty points. The abandoned cart strategy could provide the perfect vehicle to reengage with those customers and complete the sales. Pull in a live countdown timer to maximise on your customers’ sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) and bring in some relevant user-generated content (UGC) into the mix to boost brand trust, to deck your program out for the big event.
By implementing the above tips, you can free yourself from the time consuming task of fulfilling unpredictable demand during an intense period and instead provide a more customer-centred experience for your shoppers. The more customers you have in your database, the more opportunity you’ve got to bag serious revenue.
Aparna Gray is head of marketing – APAC at dotmailer.
Want the latest retail news delivered straight to your inbox? Click here to sign up to the weekly retailbiz newsletter.