Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns: How to Do It and Why You Need It

Email marketing is kind of like the Many-Faced God in the hit series Game Of Thrones. It can have many faces, can convert beyond belief and drives ROI that is about…

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Fantastic, isn’t it? This is why using email marketing to boost your marketing endeavors is a tactic that makes a lot of sense.

There are different types of email to serve different causes and different email marketing and automation companies that can do your job for you.

For example, if you need referrals, you can encourage your subscribers to share your fantastic offer. Therefore, you’ll use an email marketing and automation software like Moosend, a great Mailchimp alternative, that can give you this ability, with just one click:

Does it look great? Is it destined to bring more engagement and boost sales, seeing as a referral is what backlinks are for a website?

Now imagine if you could send a themed email like that…

You guessed it! Today’s article is all about holiday email campaigns!

Why do you need holiday email marketing campaigns?

People will buy gifts for their loved ones during the holidays, isn’t that correct? And they’ll be pretty generous about everything they offer.

Email marketing drives the ROI I mentioned before. So, imagine what that ROI really is, during the holidays. I suppose you can follow my train of thought and can believe me when I say that combining seasonal purchases-that are not that well-thought of-with email marketing, you can convert even more!

Take a look at this statistic:

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This is a chart of the rise in holiday eCommerce sales. The Year Over Year (YoY) growth reached a staggering 16.5% from 2017 to 2018. Imagine implementing email marketing tactics to reach an even bigger percentage for your own brand!

It’s a no-brainer, really. Especially if one considers that email marketing can generate leads through referrals, as I mentioned before, and engage customers in no time.

Not convinced? Well, consider how an email can turn impulse purchases form just another marketing statistic, to a very real act!

Pressing the CTA button-whether it’s a “Shop Now” or a “Check this Out”-is the simplest way for a customer to add something to their cart, thus eliminating the need to go out of the house, walk around, check prices and whatnot.

Online purchases with precisely as many clicks as needed are a no-fuss way for everyone to shop, especially in a period as busy as Christmas or Thanksgiving.

But let’s go ahead and see how you can do it, in order for your holiday email campaigns to not only make sense, but also make your brand grow, help engagement and awareness flow and lead to higher conversion rates.

Are you local or global?

If you’re a brand that ships globally, then the very first thing you’ll need to do before coming up with any campaign, would be segmentation based on location.

Different time periods drive different revenue in different parts of the world. For example, sending Christmas offers to your Thai-based customers or 4th of July offers to your European customers, won’t exactly make a difference to your revenue.

However, selling where there’s room to sell is what it’s all about!

In the US, for example, the holiday season that can be “monetized” best, would be the time period between November (aka Thanksgiving and Black Friday) and the first week of January (late Christmas and New Year’s presents anyone?).

In Australia, Mother’s Day is big. And don’t get me started on Australia Day and the Easter holidays. Which are even bigger in Italy and the UK.

If you’re a brand that only ships locally, make sure to gather information on what the most important holidays are and plan your campaign accordingly.

Pro tip: John Doherty has created a platform, Getcredo, where you will be able to find those broader eCommerce agencies. So make sure to check it out!

Create your campaigns

Holiday email marketing campaigns are meant to (and should) be festive and fun, up to the point that the brand tone allows this, that is.

Choose the email newsletter templates that you like best and serve your campaign and purpose and start creating!

Of course, creating a campaign that will work for you, doesn’t stop there and templates are not the only thing that matters.

You’ll need subject lines that match your theme and can get your point across, otherwise, your emails will look like pairs of mismatched socks.

Make sure to use words that will be powerful but not intimidating. Like what Taylor Stitch did with their holiday email:

Check out how all the elements of the email fit together and how they complement each other. The subject line is a very clever wordplay on the classic “Trick or Treat!”, the leathery look of the email resembles a Halloween costume, the offer is right there at the center, making the elements of the email point exactly where they should and the discount code is fun but not too fun, matching the brand tone and the target audience perfectly!

Use a special offer

Seeing as the holiday period is what will drive you enough revenue to last you a lifetime (okay, I’m being dramatic, but you get the gist), then perhaps you should consider doing what Taylor Stitch did with the above example.

This means coming up with a special holiday offer that you will communicate through your email newsletter campaign.

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This is what Starbucks came up with for Valentine’s day. A special two-in-one offer that fits the nature of the holiday perfectly and is valid for beverages appropriate for the spirit of the celebration, both in terms of color and flavor.

Don’t go overboard

Of course, the only limit is your imagination, when it comes to holiday email marketing campaigns, but this doesn’t mean that you should go overboard with it.

It’s easy to exceed the limit and create an email that will be a little too long or a little too tacky. Either way, it won’t work.

So make sure to use clever CTAs and keep your message clear and simple. Your offer should be right there where customers can see it. You don’t want their attention to be anywhere but on your brand and your product!

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This is a seasonal email. However, it’s not meant to sell something but promote an event. It makes the point I’m trying to make quite clear though: The designer’s imagination seemed to cause a downfall, which is evident if one considers how many colors this email has.

So many, in fact, that the reader (me) has no idea where to focus.

Make things sound urgent!

As with everything, creating urgency is a magnificent way to get what you need in our case, to increase revenue and sales.

Make sure to use a subject line that sounds a little it “pushy”-but just enough for you to get your way. For example:

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Udemy used a timer in the email design, to count how much time the users have left, until their big Cyber Monday sale is done. The users have “Just hours” left, which of course makes those interested, run to catch the worm!

Don’t be basic

You shouldn’t use the “basic” holidays alone, as every season is a good season to maximize revenue.

So, make sure to use every arrow in your quiver. And your quiver can fit more than Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s and Thanksgiving.

There are billions of marketing opportunities out there and you can pick and choose one for every season. For example:

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Thumbtack is a website that deals with home repairs. And look at what they decided to do! They took advantage of the beginning of the summer to send a summer email for offers and benefits. No specific special occasion, no set-in-stone holiday and no questions asked.

You should take advantage of that tactic, as there is definitely something that you can use, apart from the classic holiday email marketing campaigns.

Optimize

For mobile, that is. Unless you’d like your pictures to not load properly, customers to feel frustrated and end up deleting your email or, even worse, unsubscribing.

You see, there are too many emails opens on mobile nowadays and not enough emails that are optimized.

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According to the study above, marketers view mobile-friendly design as one of the most effective tactics for improving Click-Through Rates (CTR).

Which means that optimization is not just a thing of the future-it’s the future!

Don’t believe me? Well, maybe you should check this out as well:

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This was three years ago! Obviously, the number is quite larger now. And it can be even larger if you make sure to use templates that are appropriate for mobile, images that won’t take forever to load and-by God!-content that doesn’t go on and on forever and is cryptic but not too much.

Takeaway

Of course, there’s a bunch of different email tactics, tips and tricks for every business and every budget, whether the goal is a holiday email marketing campaign or a successful and unique email marketing campaign in general.

So, don’t lose any more time, go ahead and try those tips and tricks and let me know what worked for you or what you’d do differently in the comments.

And as always, don’t forget to share the knowledge with your favorite marketer!

This is a guest post by Téa, a content writer working for email marketing software company Moosend and an obsessive writer in general. In her free time, she tries to find new ways to stuff more books in her bookcase and content ideas-and cats-to play with.