5 Tips to Make Holiday Marketing Magic
by Audrey Howes
The holiday season is officially upon us. Now is the time to finalize your holiday email marketing plan and set it in motion. To help you make the most of this all-important season we’ve put together 5 tips to help your campaigns make magic for your bottom line as you come to year’s end.
1. Who’s Who in Your Audience
It is especially important to segment your audience during your holiday email marketing blitz. According to Nielsen, 72% of women and 68% of men have shopped online in the past 30 days, but women lead in all of the purchase categories except for music, auctions and computer hardware. Women buy online more often than men and are shopping for different kinds of items than their male counterparts. Customers who have been dormant all year come out of the woodwork to look for that special gift. Businesses may be looking for employee gifts or tokens of appreciation for their clients. Spend some time breaking your list down into segments that make sense for your demographic and create emails tailored to those segments.
2. Keep it Simple
It can be tempting to overload your email with all of the special offers and promotions you are running for the holiday season. Instead of overwhelming your recipients with too many options consider focusing the email around one main offer with two or three secondary offers. After a couple of sends with one offer, analyze your open and click through rates to determine if the main offer should remain in the spotlight or if a secondary offer should take center stage instead.
3. Be Fashionably Late
When the holiday season hits, email inboxes become flooded with holiday promotions. A recent syudy by Experian revealed that email volume increases over 20% as the holiday season draws nearer. With the onslaught of emails, how can yours stand out? Many email marketers schedule their sends for before 9 a.m. Avoid the busiest times to send by sending your email later in the day.
4. Spread the Word
Last year Facebook surpassed Google as the most visited site on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Years Day. Don’t underestimate the importance of spreading your holiday marketing promotions across your social networks. Swiftpage emarketing Connect users can use Swiftpage emarketing Social Sharing to quickly and easily post their holiday promotions on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you are not a Swiftpage emarketing Connect user, you can still post your emails to your social networks by creating landing pages of your promotional emails in Swiftpage emarketing and posting the links across your networks. (Social Sharing for our integrations is coming soon!)
5. Don’t Miss the Big Dates
The holiday season boasts some especially important dates for marketers. Plan now for how you will reach your customers before and on these high traffic shopping days.
- Thanksgiving Day – November 22
- Black Friday – November 23
- Cyber Monday – November 26
- Saint Nicholas Day – December 6
- Hanukkah starts December 8
- Last Saturday before Christmas Eve – December 22
- Super Saturday – December 22
- Boxing Day/The Day After Christmas – December 26
Now is the time to adjust your holiday email marketing plan. Marketing magic is just around the corner when you use the tips above in your email blasts. Happy holidays!
