Black Friday is over, Cyber Monday is gone, but email marketing world is not slowing down! December is the busiest month of the year for email marketers. The holiday period is one of the most profitable of the year, so if you don’t get your email marketing right for the holidays, you are missing out big time! Just so you know, according to Mailcharts, email marketing is responsible for 20% of holiday sales!

That is why we have prepared a list of tips for your holiday email marketing strategy. Plus at the end of this article, we have a special treat for you, a story on how Winston saved Christmas!

First things first… the dates!

All around the world, there are different holidays, which very often are accompanied by PEAK SALES times. For example in the USA, the most important holiday season runs from November to January. Make sure that you have written down a list of key holidays in your location, and that you’ve built your email marketing strategy around those dates.

Strong and relevant subject line

SUBJECT LINE IS SUPER IMPORTANT, SUBJECT LINE IS SUPER IMPORTANT, SUBJECT LINE IS SUPER IMPORTANT. Why? Well, 62% of customers open an email due to a personalized title, and 68% of email recipients report your email as a spam, only by reading the subject. If you are ranking the email title as a low priority, you will spend a great amount of time in creating an awesome content, which no one will read, as your subject sucks, is indistinctive, dull, doesn’t grab attention. Focus on crafting something spectacular, use your inner creativity and let yourselves go wild – it is a holiday season! Keep your subject short, use power words: short and to the point, personalize with the data to you possess, and use emojis! The research shows, that emojis in subject lines can increase your open rates even by 56%!

Allow and encourage subscribers to share

According to QuickSprout, email subscribers are 3x more likely to share your content on their social media, than leads sourced from different channels. Don’t waste this opportunity! Encourage your audience to share your emails, allow them to become your brand ambassadors. This way you will reach a greater audience at no extra cost or work! Word of mouth and recommendations are still one of the strongest lead generation sources.

Urgency, scarcity, FOMO

To increase the ROI of your holiday email campaign use the most intensive motivator of all – time! Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a great tool that emphasizes time as a motivator and may convince your yet undecided customer to purchase. A time-limited holiday offer encourages visitors to take action now because nobody likes to miss out. However, it is crucial to understand that it is not supposed to trick your customer into buying something but giving them a reason to act now. Never ever tell your customers that the promotional offer is ending in 2 hours, when in fact it will still be live on your website, the next day. You will ruin your relationship with a customer and completely lose their trust.

Optimize for mobiles

Did you realize that more people check their email via mobile devices than desktops? Make your email design mobile-friendly, so you won’t miss out on this major audience. If your email isn’t optimized for mobiles, your readers might delete it in as little as 3 seconds. You just can’t afford to not take action. Invest some time to improve your email design now. Use responsive templates, that adapt to the different sizes of screens, keep the headline big and bold, optimize your images, so they upload quickly, make sure that your Call To Action is standing out, and the copy is short. Last but not least – test it out before sending!

Segmentation

There’s no point in marketing to the wrong people. Therefore, to improve your email marketing always segment your lists! By this you will be able to send more relevant and targeted content to your recipient, that will actually be interested in it. Your subscribers expect to receive a good value in your emails, that is why they decided to share their data with you. They will appreciate and reward your effort as segmented campaigns show an increase of 760% in email revenue.
Focus on sending information within your holiday campaigns, that your audience is interested in right now, as they start their holiday shopping. For example Holiday gift guides, ideas on how your brand can reduce the holiday shopping stress, promotional offers, last minute deals, a review of how your relationship with a customer looked like the past calendar year.
Don’t bore your audience with yet another standard template, spice it up with some holiday-themed gifs, pictures, images, holiday hashtags! Check our Email Segmentation article to learn more.

Winston saves Christmas (I mean…he says so)

Not every hero wears a cape! Some of them wear a hat and a tie! Let me tell you a story of Winston, a holiday saver from Bouncer. Once upon a time, there was an email marketer Jim that was given a project of Christmas email marketing campaign for his customer, biggest toys company in the entire universe! He worked very hard, day and night to prepare an awesome looking email, with a great subject line, appealing offers, and even optimized it for mobile! But Jim almost forgot to check the list of emails for any bad addresses on it! Running out of time, he just lost his hope, that he will make it before the deadline. Out of nowhere came Winston, and took this pile of work of Jims’ shoulders. Winston used Bouncer application to verify the list and returned the results promptly. Jim was saved, the campaign with awesome toys offers was saved, parents bought presents on time, and children couldn’t be happier with it! Christmas saved! Don’t be like Jim, verify your list earlier, and don’t stress before Christmas!
Look out for our super Holiday offer, available from 6th December! Follow our social media to find out first!