Dreaming of Your Holiday Email Campaign? Avoid These Mistakes

The holidays will be here before you know it, and these five tips can help ensure you have a successful holiday email campaign.

Check a calendar lately? The holidays, man – they are coming and they’re coming fast. And with them come the heaviest shopping days of the year.

Is your business ready to take advantage?

If you’re like most, you plan to use the end of the year to boost your 2014 sales, and email marketing will play an important role in helping you to do that. Email provides marketers of all shapes and sizes a cost-effective, intimate, and ROI-packed way to stay top of mind with customers, the very people busily preparing to open their wallets and unleash on the holiday frenzy.

But before you hit send on those holiday emails, keep reading to help avoid some of the most common (and costly) email marketing errors. It’s one way to prevent a not-so-jolly holiday.

1. Not Having a Plan for Holiday Marketing

Oh, did you not realize the holidays were around the corner and you were supposed to prepare a marketing strategy? Yeah. That.

If you don’t yet have a holiday marketing plan in place, cancel your afternoon meetings, pull your team together, and brainstorm what it is you can get done in the time you have left. You don’t want to head into this holiday season without a solid plan for how you intend to handle it internally. No one wants to be the business still designing its holiday greeting on December 21.

You also don’t want to be known as the business that simply forgot. Going radio silent and dropping from view during this time may mean a loss revenue as customers are spending holiday dollars with competitors who did remember to market to them.

So what can you still do? Maybe it’s:

  • Creating a new holiday-themed email template ready for some crafty creative
  • Building out one product-focused landing page for quarter four’s hot Product X
  • Filming a holiday video designed to pull at your customers’ heartstrings and open their wallets
  • Designing holiday graphics for all your social media channels and ramping up your social media to make your team on-call customer helpers

2. Sending Me Untargeted Messages

So, here’s the thing – if you have my email address, you know stuff about me. You know if I’m totally new to your company or if I’ve purchased from you before. You also know what I’ve purchased, how often I’ve purchased and what it is I’m likely to purchase next. You know what my email client is and what technology I’m likely using it. [By the way – if you don’t know, a service like MyAcxiomPartner can help.]

So use it. Don’t pretend we’ve just met and you don’t even know my first name.

If you’re going to invest in email this holiday season, really invest in email. Take the time to segment your list, to break out customer groups, and to market to me appropriately. Even if you’re only segmenting by new customers vs. returning customers – do something that allows your brand to present me with offers or information that is relevant to my relationship with you and that tells the right story.

‘Tis the season for a great story.

3. Not Making Your Holiday Emails Mobile-Friendly

According to Custora’s Pulse E-Commerce Survey, nearly 40 percent of all 2013 Black Friday holiday sales happened on a mobile device. People were actually pulling out their phones and converting while standing in line at the mall on a never-moving line.

Think that’s crazy? It’s not, and it’s a behavior that’s growing, not fading away.

Because of that, a few things are absolutely true for your 2014 holiday email marketing:

  • A customer must be able to open your marketing campaign on any device
  • They must be able to properly navigate the landing page that campaign drives them to
  • They must be able to navigate the whole conversion process – from email to sale – from any device

These things are non-negotiable. But don’t worry, if don’t make it easy for customers to convert from any device, they’ll still do it. From your competitor’s site.

4. Not Complementing Email With Direct Marketing

Email marketing works great. As mentioned, it’s cost-effective, it’s personal, and it packs a powerful ROI. But know when email marketing works even better? When it’s paired with direct marketing.

Don’t leave email marketing out in the cold this holiday season. Integrate it with other direct marketing efforts to help you build the buzz and the excitement. According to Experian, 40 percent of all marketers will integrate email in their cross-channel holiday campaigns.

How can your brand use email to strengthen your other marketing efforts? Maybe it’s sending out targeted postcards that advertise specific deals to specific personas, but save your dollars by using a similar design as your email template. Or, maybe it’s a direct mail piece that points customers to a 2014 holiday landing page, the same one you’re pairing with email, with altered messaging.

5. Avoid the Holiday Clichés

For the love of all things Santa, get those holiday puns out of your email subject line and body copy. Don’t even pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.

“It’s time to ring in the deals!”

“Got your list? Checking it twice?”

“Jingle all the way to great savings!”

Yeah, we’ve heard them all before. And so have your customers. While using blatant holiday puns may seem like a good idea during the 5 p.m. creative meeting, they’re bound to get eye-rolls from your customers. Worse, your emails may be immediately deleted. When sending holiday email marketing, it’s best to catch your reader’s eye by using simple, descriptive, and direct language. Skip the clichés.

Whether you sell a product, a service, or just information, email marketing can help you engage with holiday shoppers and keep you top of mind during Q4’s crucial last few moments.

The time to unleash those holiday campaigns is just about here. However, before you do, by adhering to the tips above, you can help sure those holiday emails go off without a hitch.

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