Email content is a key component to consistent sales all year round, especially for e-commerce businesses, but even more so when your target audience is doing their holiday shopping for Christmas, Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and everything else that goes on this time of the year.
As the end-of-year shopping season can be quite busy with holiday shoppers rushing to get everything for their decorations, holiday parties, and gifts, retailers need to make it easy for customers to buy from them. Use promotional emails to remind new customers and loyal email subscribers that your business exists and has the perfect gift for their impossible-to-buy-relative as well as irresistible holiday offers.
A robust email marketing strategy during the holiday season can be multi-faceted. So here’s everything you need to know to leverage your email list for impressive holiday sales—no matter what type of business you own (e.g., med spa, jewelry store, HVAC business, car dealership, or furniture store).
3 Benefits of Having a Holiday Email Marketing Strategy
The holiday season is the perfect time to up your email marketing game for various reasons. The most obvious is the higher demand during a limited period.
That means you also have an opportunity to boost your brand awareness as customers look out for the perfect gift and special offers. By positioning your business as the perfect place to shop to get presents, decorations, and anything else holiday-related, you’ll be able to put yourself on the map as a go-to for your target audience.
Taking advantage of customer demand to raise your brand awareness is made a lot easier as holiday promotions are expected to be more fun and creative to match the mood of the time of year as a result increasing engagement. If there was any time to invest in your email marketing, it’s now because people are ready to engage. Especially if you have a solution to make this time of year a little less stressful.
With that in mind, here are some email marketing tips to boost sales this holiday season.
9 Holiday Email Marketing Strategy Examples
1. Stand-Out Subject Lines
You won’t be the only business banking on the holiday season to boost sales. Your target audience will be receiving holiday email promotions from plenty of other retailers. Just think about the number of Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails you got last year! So when your customers check their inboxes, you want your emails to stand out.
The best way to keep your open rates up is to write strong email subject lines. So, how do you make your subject lines stronger? Using emojis can be helpful as they stand out among text. Using humor and holiday puns can also be attention-grabbing. Consider any trends going around on social media to see if they will translate to email marketing. Start your email marketing campaign how you wish to go on.
2. Holiday Gift Guides
You can make it much easier for customers to buy from you by telling them what products you have that would work well as holiday gifts. Instead of wondering what to buy, all they have to do is click ‘add to cart’. That’s a massive relief they’ll be very appreciative of.
Gift guides work best when you categorize your products so customers can quickly narrow down their search. Gift guides could be themed around types of products (e.g. sweaters, scarves hats, and coats), gifts for different types of people (e.g. gifts for him and gifts for her), or gifts for different budgets (e.g. $10 Secret Santa gifts and extravagant gifts for that special someone).
3. Holiday-Themed Email Design
As well as perfecting the copy of your email campaigns, don’t forget that visuals play a part in conversion rates too. Think about the colors, images, and layout that will best support your holiday promotion efforts. Look out for holiday email templates on your email marketing tool as an easy way to spruce up your email design. You could even make it fun by including emojis and gifs inside the email.
With more going on visually in your email marketing campaigns, make sure the call to action is really clear so you don’t compromise click-through rates. The best combination to encourage click-through is an image of the product which when clicked takes them to the landing page to purchase and a CTA button which does the same.
4. Limited-Time Offers
The holiday season is a fast-paced time of year. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all the special days in between fly by at a rapid rate. Double down on the fast-paced nature of the holidays by offering limited-time deals. This is the standard for Black Friday email promotions but you could offer it for the longer Christmas shopping season too.
How about doing a ‘12 days of Christmas’ email campaign where on each of the 12 days a different product is on offer for that day? Or you could offer a coupon that is only valid for the final weekend before Christmas to help out last-minute shoppers. Think about your target audience and the kind of special offers they would jump at the chance to get. Whatever you decide to offer, it can be impactful to include a countdown clock in your emails to highlight how little time customers have left to claim the offer.
5. Early Bird Offers
You don’t have to wait to send your email holiday promotions until you’ve got your Christmas tree up. Some customers like to start their holiday shopping early so they are ready to go. Why not send an early bird offer to your email list to encourage early shoppers to shop with you and not-so-organized shoppers to see what you have available to them as they start to put their shopping lists together?
A countdown clock or countdown series of emails can work well with early bird offers too because they have their end date before your general holiday offers begin. The sooner you boost your sales, the better for you right?
6. Last-Minute Gift Ideas
Every year some last-minute shoppers are panicking a couple of days before Christmas as they try to get a decent gift for everyone. With the rise of e-commerce, even last-minute shoppers will be looking online for gifts but could struggle with delivery dates, especially with the speed (or lack of speed) of couriers during the holiday season. Don’t lose out on business from them!
Help them out by offering digital products that they can buy for their loved ones. Digital products are a great money-making opportunity even for retailers who sell physical products. You could offer a subscription that will deliver products to a customer every month, quarter, or other frequency. You could keep it simple and offer a gift card so the gift receiver can choose the product for themselves. Either way, last-minute shoppers don’t have to rely on parcels arriving in time.
7. Smaller Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns
Christmas, Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t the only sales-boosting occasions happening in the final quarter of the year. There are other smaller holidays you can use as a vehicle for promotions, even if your target audience doesn’t realize they are happening. That’s what email marketing is for. Let them know of the special day, what it’s all about, and the holiday promotion you are offering to celebrate.
This works particularly well if the holiday is specialized to your business and/or target market such as Small Business Saturday which reminds your subscribers that you’re a small business they can support when doing their holiday shopping. You can also have some fun with it. For example, Monday, December 4th, 2023 is National Sock Day. If you sell socks, that’s a perfect email marketing idea for you.
8. Implement Automation
There are a lot of opportunities to drive sales during this time of year. So make it easier for your team and in turn for your customers by setting up email automation. Check the automated emails you have set up year-round to refine their content and make it festive such as your welcome emails and abandoned cart emails.
Look at putting together other automated emails to remind your email list of all the special offers and festive products you have available. Set up automation for the countdown of the expiry of offers so they don’t forget and miss out. These emails can be simple reminders with a good dose of holiday humor. Don’t be afraid to send multiple reminders. Your customers are busy so they’re not going to see or remember the contents of every email. That doesn’t mean they’re not interested.
9. List Segmentation
Sending the right people the right recommendations and prompts is essential to generating revenue from your email marketing strategy. By segmenting your email list into different categories you can personalize the type of emails your audience receives from your business. This helps to retain their interest and avoid overwhelming them, particularly during the holiday season when everyone is trying to sell to them.
You could categorize your email list into the type of products they’re interested in considering what they have purchased or shown some kind of interest in before. However during this time of year, customers aren’t just shopping for themselves, they’re shopping for other people. So they might be buying things they wouldn’t buy from themselves.
It could be more useful to segment your email list according to the regularity of their buying behavior.
- You could have a category for people who buy from you regularly, reminding them of items they may want to put on their own Christmas list or buy for themselves as a treat.
- Another segment would be the seasonal shoppers who only tend to purchase from you around the holidays. There’s a good chance they’re shopping for other people so make sure they get your gift guides.
- You could add a third segment for sales shoppers. These are customers who only tend to buy from you when they have a coupon or the holiday sale is on. Make sure they get reminders for when sales start and end.
Refining who receives what emails gives you the best chance of those emails converting which is the whole point of implementing an email marketing strategy for the holidays.
Using just a couple of these holiday email marketing strategies will give you a massive leg up when it comes to hitting and exceeding your end-of-year sales targets. So jump on it ASAP.
SMS Marketing
Many retailers rely on the holiday season to bring in a significant percentage of their annual revenue. This year will be no different. Despite the rising demand from consumers, there is plenty of competition for their attention from other businesses and the general chaos of the festive period. Make sure they don’t forget about you and your amazing products by putting together a compelling and irresistible Christmas email marketing campaign.
Although, email marketing is not the only tool you can use to reach out to customers and ensure they know about your holiday promotions. SMS marketing has been proven to work even better because it has such high open and response rates. Instead of having to compete with oversaturated email inboxes, you can touch base with customers via text with short, snappy, and high-converting messages.
If you want to maximize your holiday sales, implement a text marketing strategy alongside email marketing and manage both on the Podium lead conversion platform.
