Everyone loves Christmas right? Chocolate, Turkey, Wine, Presents. But do you receive any unwanted emails in the build up to the oh so jolly festive season?
We can guarantee that your competitors will be planning Christmas early and so should you.
Christmas time - the festive season offers a great opportunity to increase comms to get your brand top of mind at an important time for customers via a number of different email marketing options:
- Wish your recipients “Merry Christmas”
- Creative campaigns, such as 12 days of Christmas or advent calendars
- Relevant product promotions
- “Still time to buy” reminder campaigns
- Sales, discount codes and delivery
So what are the 7 tips can we give you to make sure your email marketing efforts don’t make you come across like Scrooge.
Aims & objectives
Like all good email campaigns the first thing to do is decide what you want to achieve from the campaign. All of your aims and objectives can be used to inform your messaging - so it’s important that these are the first things that are confirmed.
Make sure you have some KPIs that you can measure against. It could be opens, it could be clicks or the resulting sales - whatever the goal of your email try and track it so you can be sure that it has worked.
what would scrooge do?
Objectives... Pfft. I put as much emphasis on goals as England did in the Euros
Plan
Guess what, Christmas happens at the same time EVERY YEAR so think about your campaigns early. And when I mean early I mean yesterday! You cannot be over prepared at Christmas. Santa doesn’t wait until Christmas Eve to get the presents ready so don’t do so with your email marketing.
What would Scrooge do?
Scrooge doesn’t want to plan early, that means thinking about Christmas before the day it arrives. Oh no no – that emails getting hashed together on December the 24th that’ll be loads of time.
Target
Let’s not forget it’s likely that we’re not the only ones undertaking a Christmas email campaign. And, if you are using data effectively, it means you can do some incredibly clever targeting and personalisation.
Inboxes are going to be full so we need to make sure that our email is a welcome presence in the inbox. Use what information you know about your customers, show them that you care and make them feel valued. That way you’ll be sending the right message to the right people at the right time.
What would Scrooge do?
Targeting – why would I do that? Let’s bosh out one email and send it to everyone…
Test
Do you know what works best? To make the most of your emails you should be constantly testing finding out what works best, when and evolving. Test send times; test subject lines; test changing your content and then tweak and improve.
What would Scrooge do?
Let’s just get it out there – I don’t care when – I don’t care how; I want it gone.
Cta
Your email has to have a strong CTA and it needs to be really easy for the customer to act upon. Customers are time poor at this time of year so you want to make their lives easier.
What would Scrooge do?
If I offer a CTA I am going to get people trying to speak to me - oh no I don’t want that.
Spam triggers
It's widely accepted that there are number of keywords that can trigger as spam and Christmas highlights these potential keywords even further. Top spam characteristics include:
- BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image area
- BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
- BODY: HTML and text parts are different
- Subject is all capitals
- Recipient’s email address is not in the To: or Cc: fields
Make sure you’re not falling foul to risky spam signals in your content, subject line or from address. You want to give your email the best possible chance of being picked up and opened.
What would Scrooge do?
THIS EMAIL CONTAINS HIDDEN ASSETS WHICH REVERSES AGING, STOPS SNORING & CAN MAKE YOU SOME SERIOUS CASH. SALE NOW ON, SO GET YOUR FREE INVESTMENT TODAY… So, OPEN MY EMAIL NOW…
Creativity
Christmas email campaigns are going to be everywhere so we’ve got to do something to make ours stand out against everyone else. Try and be a little bit creative with your messaging and design, to create a bit of holiday buzz in line with the time of year. A simple “buy into our services” message is not going to stand out at this time of year.
Offer something of value to your audience, grab attention, create a sense of urgency and be memorable.
What would Scrooge do?
Stolid and somewhat dull that’s the kind of email that I’ll be putting my name to.
So what next
So, it may only be July, but Christmas will be here before you know it. So take away these top tips to ensure it’ll be a success.
- Decide what you aims and objectives for the campaign are – this way you can track whether it will be a success
- Embrace planning now - don’t wait until it’s too late – no one wants to be playing catchup in December
- Set up some targeting and personalisation rather then send out a blanket email – make your customer feel like it is written specially for them
- Test your send – mix up the content subject line or send time – find out what works best and when
- Include a clear CTA – make sure it’s clear what you want your audience to do and how they can go about doing it?
- Don’t fall foul to any spam triggers – make sure your email arrives in your customers’ inbox and get noticed
- Be creative – grab attention and offer something of value
