The holiday season brings 50-100% more revenue for online and offline stores than the rest of the year. An important part of that revenue increase certainly comes from the emails sent during this important period: with all those holiday emails coming in, what can you do to make sure your emails get in front of your customers' eyes?
If you want to ensure that you’ll get your piece of the holiday pie, then read on:
Which are some of the best ways to generate more holiday sales in 2018?
1. Create A Holiday Mailing List
With the holiday season knocking on the door, you need to make sure that you send your holiday email campaign to the right people who are actually interested in your services/products.
In order to do this, you can:
- Set up an email sign-up form on your website so people who wish to receive holiday sale updates will fill out the form.
- Send an email to your email list asking if they would like to be a part of the exclusive member’s sales.
See what I just did? By sending an email and asking them to be part of the “exclusive member list”, you create an incentive and some expectations. Use it wisely. PS: Christmas emails should have Christmas themed signup forms, same goes with NewYear and any other type of holiday.
Matching your sign-up template with the related holiday will help your subscribers better relate with the holiday season and will trigger emotions that will make them want to sign up for these upcoming sales.
This way, you’ll be able to target your marketing efforts more directly to the people who are interested and who are more likely to buy something from you.
2. Make Your Email Campaign Mobile Friendly
If you haven’t done it so far, it’s important to design and create your holiday emails for mobile users as well. Mobile phones have overtaken computers in the device type that people use to open their emails. If your holiday email campaign isn’t optimized for mobile, then you can lose a lot of sales. In fact, any email that doesn’t render well on mobile is likely to get deleted in 3 seconds and 15% of your subscribers won’t even bother deleting. Instead, they’ll choose to unsubscribe from your list altogether.
By having your email campaign optimized for mobile, then your emails will be easier to read on any mobile phone. Making your holiday email user-friendly and easy to read, you may increase your holiday sales significantly, so why waste this great opportunity?
3. Take care of your email list
Before sending your holiday email campaign, you need to do a little maintenance to maximize your potential revenue:
- Clean up your email list - it’s super important to have a good quality email list, with people who are interested in your services/products. To make sure that your email list is ready for the holiday season, you can do a quick email validation
By validating your email list you will be able to remove invalid emails, lower your bounce rate and increase the deliverability rate. - Try a themed email template - you can make your email stand out by using a different email template for the holidays.
4. Announce your holiday campaign
Instead of sending only one email to promote your holiday campaign, you can send several emails, just to “heat” them up. Here’s an idea of how you can do it:
- Email #1: Teaser. Tell your customers/subscribers about the upcoming deal. Try to give them specific products, prices and availability.
- Email #2: Sale is ON. Send an email to everyone and let them know that your holiday campaign has started and they can take advantage of the deal now.
- Email #3: Last chance. Send a reminder on the last day/hour of your campaign.
**5. Send segmented campaigns **
Segmenting your email list is crucial.
People assume that your company is gathering data, and they expect you to use it in order to send them only the information they’re interested in.
Break out your email list into various segments that allow you to show relevant products to each segment. This gives you an opportunity to cross-sell and upsell your customers.
Holiday email marketing segments keep in mind:
- VIP customers.
- High average order value customers.
- High total transaction customers.
- Subscribers who have not made a purchase.
- Customers who haven’t bought recently: 30 days, 90 days, and 180 days ago.
- Demographics: age, location, income.
Creating targeted emails for each segment will definitely improve your conversion rate compared to a generic email.
6. Make the subject line relevant & personal
Did you know that more than 60% of the people open an email due to the personalized subject line?
The subject line is one of the key factors that will determine whether or not your emails will get opened in the first place.
Be sure to include power words that are short and straight to the point. You’ll also want to include personalization: most of the customers expect a 1:1 experience when they engage with your brand and personalization is a great way to deliver and even exceed those expectations. Don’t be afraid of emojis, either. When used well, emojis are proven to increase your opens
7. Include offers and incentives
A very good method to increase sales is to include offers and discounts in your emails and this holiday season is no different, especially when is expected to spend more money, offering them a great deal will encourage them to spend more than usual. This is also a great tactic to increase customer retention.
More than 70% of people open an email due to the discount it offers, so make your email campaign enticing by offering subscribers something really special.
Follow these seven holiday email tips to make your emails stand out in the inbox so you can maximize your ROI this year. Oh, and don’t forget to validate your email list; in the end, it all starts with a high-quality list of emails!