The holiday season will be here soon, and so will the opportunity to increase your sales revenue manifolds. Are you planning to expand your business this holiday season? If yes, then email marketing will be an excellent means of doing this. Whether it be big business houses or newly founded start-ups, everyone has reckoned the importance of email marketing in reaching out to existing consumers and building a new customer base.
Email marketing is one of the many branches of digital marketing. Digital marketing also consists of social media marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media optimization, and display advertising.
The holiday season is the time of the year when the brands can make up for the losses incurred during the previous year because e-commerce has had a massive influence on customers’ buying choices this year. Here we shall be listing a few points that you can quickly jot down to understand email marketing’s essence in today’s business scenario.
So let’s get started.
Significance of Email marketing during the holiday season
Today social media presence primarily describes the milieu of most people. Email marketing can be a great way of boosting your business this holiday season and getting a high ROI on your sales. It is crucial to devise a strategy before employing email marketing as a tool in your business growth model.
Here are some numbers that support the significance of email marketing among business houses.
The ROI through email marketing peaked in 2018 at 18.49%; although 2019 and 2020 saw a significant slash, it is still a respectable 15.11% conversion in 2020.
Email marketing can help grow and expand an existing business in the following possible ways –
- The holiday season is an excellent occasion for sellers to reach out to customers who are browsing through their emails while enjoying a hot chocolate by the fire. They also serve as an excellent means of regaining your lost customers and bringing them back aboard.
- You can capture your target audience’s interest by giving them hot deals and offers and staying ahead of your rivals this festive season.
- By sending emails with significant and personalized subject lines, you can open new avenues for your business by engaging prospective buyers. Once they click and open the email, there is a high probability of buying.
- You can also send coupons and gifts by email to help you stand out from the competition, and this will also increase the prospects of your sale.
- We can expect this year’s holiday sales to shatter previous records with sales of around $189 billion, almost twice the last year, with Black Friday sales alone expected to be approximately $10 billion.
Black Friday: The best of the days to shop
The Friday that follows Thanksgiving day is named Black Friday informally in the United States. The day after Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the USA since 1952, though the term “Black Friday” is of a more recent origin.
Many sellers are waiting for Black Friday to boost their sales. Millions of shoppers flock to the stores, both physically and through online channels, to get hold of their favorite products by securing the best deals. You can use this occasion to your advantage by sending discounts and offers via emails to restless shoppers.
It is 3x more likely that an email subscriber will share a product on social media than the leads from other channels.
Besides Black Friday, there is another day known as Cyber Monday or Blue Monday which is a marketing term coined by retailers to encourage online shopping among consumers. The Monday following the Thanksgiving Holiday is the Cyber Monday in the United States. In 2017, Cyber Monday online sales grew to a record of $6.59 billion, compared with $2.98 billion in 2015 and $2.65 billion in 2014.
2019 witnessed the best Black Friday ever, with consumers spending a total of $7.4 billion online – an increase of $1.2 billion since 2018.
This year on November 26th, the holiday shopping chaos will kick off officially. By sending emails directly to the customers, you can leverage them to buy your product. For this, you will have to plan your strategy by optimizing your servers, enhancing your internet speed, updating your inventory, and presenting the best deals to the customers. Also, you can add a cherry to the cake by offering free shipping.
How to effectively plan email marketing campaigns during Holidays?
Early preparations for the holiday season can give your business a headstart. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas are coming; it is the time of the year, which can provide excellent revenue on your sales. So, fasten your seatbelts because this period can be a little crazy for you.
By adopting these strategies, you can best utilize this time of the year. Let’s glance through these –
Prepare well in advance.
Please don’t wait for the holiday season to set a plan; instead, get it done in advance, so you don’t have to care about things right in the middle of the sales chaos. During this period, the customer volume is higher than usual, so you have to be ready well in advance. Focus on your target audience – what they want and how much they want to spend. You can get started by adopting a segmentation strategy for your customers based on the following factors
Enumerate
Whether you are a B2B seller or dealing directly with the consumers, you can divide them based on their age, gender, their current designation, and how much do they earn.
The more information gathered during the email signup process, the more influential the enumeration or the demographic segmentation will be but do not trouble the customers too much during the process by asking for too many personal details.
Analyze the past trends
Past purchase analysis can help you in the segmentation of the audience by optimizing the targeting process. Consider sending personalized emails based on the items and accessories that a consumer has purchased in the past.
Also, by using the customer expense history, you can make the segmentation process more manageable if you have products with a wide range of prices.
You can send out targeted emails by keeping in mind each person’s price range.
Rewarding via quiz or survey
By creating a quiz or a survey, you can get to know people’s interests, individual tastes, beliefs, and preferences. By offering some incentives, you can draw more people into taking the quiz or survey.
Use Pay per click model
Pay per click model of advertising is becoming quite popular. The advertiser pays a fee every time someone clicks an advertisement. It is highly effective for driving qualified and immediate traffic. It can leverage the targeted audience when they are looking for goods or services. The pay-per-click model may seem more comfortable, but it requires a lot of effort in reality. Sometimes PPC ad campaigns do not give the desired result due to their poor implementation.
Here are some strategies for increasing PPC traffic during the holiday season –
- By allocating a good portion of the total budget for the PPC ad campaign
- Focussing on the holiday keywords to convert the sales
- Feed optimization can prove to be a boon for your business during the holiday season.
- By evaluating the needs and interests, you can have a better reach to your target audience.
- Analyze the audience report of google analytics and prepare a remarking list to convert your sales with cross-channel marketing.
Keep your goal in mind.
You must set your goals to weigh the achievement with the target and rectify your strategy in the future if that needs to be. To achieve the decided goal, follow a proper path with great enthusiasm.
Prepare a list of Holidays.
One of the email marketing tips is to integrate the list of holidays into your email marketing calendar.
For this, google analytics data will come to your rescue by letting you figure out which day brings in more sales and generate the best revenue.
Take initiatives
By analyzing and comparing the achieved sales with the target, you can monitor your email marketing campaign’s success. You can also take some critical steps in this process and prepare plans for future campaigns.
How to make email marketing more effective this Holiday season?
Here are some tips to make your email marketing campaign reach out just to the heart of the customers –
Create Holiday Gift Guides for the consumers
It’s a great marketing idea and surpasses regular promo emails’ conversion rates by around 48%.
You can divide your Gift ideas into categories based on age group, gender, and geography. Analyze users’ past purchases and offer them unique gifts and discounts.
Designing holiday-themed campaigns
You can switch to holiday themes and colors in your email marketing campaign to avoid the audience’s boredom by sending those regular emails. You can include an HTML email template for holidays to spice up things and attract your customers.
Segment your targeted audience
One of the more effective email marketing methods is to send personalized emails based on users’ interests and preferences rather than sending out the same email in bulk. For this, make use of analytics data and prepare accordingly.
Make an offer that a user can’t deny
By giving priority to your essential and loyal customers, you can make email marketing more effective. Use personalized and tailored emails to offer exclusive discounts and early sales benefits to important and loyal consumers.
Focus on CTA
While sending emails, keep a unique eye on the title, subject, and CTA (call to action), which must be relevant. The CTA button design has to be appealing to the consumers and should accord with your email design.
Final Take:
To have a fantastic holiday season for your business, you can consider adopting some of the measures to boost your sales.
- Provide exclusive discounts to the prospective buyers
- Give special attention to holiday themes and the title of the email.
- Announce the sales well in advance.
- Free shipping can give you an edge over your competitors.
- Take the help of analytics data to target the audience to get the maximum returns.
