The ultimate guide to email marketing at Christmas
Charlotte Stephen - 11 September 2019
If you want your Christmas period to be the “most wonderful time of the year” for your business, you’ll need a strong email marketing campaign. According to Monate, email marketing drives more conversions than other marketing networks, so it is important to focus your efforts on your Christmas email campaign and start this process early.
The preparation phase
In order for your Christmas email campaign to be a success story, you must start planning and preparing for your campaign early. You should start building up interest way in advance by ensuring you regularly email your customers before releasing your Christmas campaign. This helps to build up a relationship with your customers and helps them to become familiar with your brand and the products or services you have to offer.
Then, when focusing on your upcoming Christmas email campaign, a great place to start is by analysing previous campaigns. The more data you can collect and evaluate from email campaigns in the past, the more you’ll be able to perfect this campaign with the data in mind. It may be helpful to look at what campaigns led to the most conversions, what sort of products were the most popular and on what days leading up to Christmas were campaigns most successful in terms of conversions.
After starting to build rapport with your customers and looking at previous data, you’re ready to go!
Split testing
A/B split testing is a great method for testing your campaigns. Split testing enables you to test everything from subject line to content to format, to see what works best for your customers and what gains the most engagement. This continuous experimentation is a brilliant way to perfect your campaign over the Christmas period.
Optimising your email campaign
Personalisation is a great way to optimise your email campaign and engage with your customers. Personalised emails increase click-through rates by 14% and increase conversions by 10% so be sure to put this into practice this holiday season.
Content, content, content
Another strategy to optimise your email campaign is by creating outstanding content. Just think of how many emails flood your inbox during the Christmas period; you need your campaign to stand out. You want it to be fun, seasonal and exciting for customers, whilst still ensuring your brand’s identity is positively reflected. Images are a key part of your email content. Further features you could consider include a countdown to Christmas, adding urgency to your campaign for those last-minute shoppers.
Additionally, your campaign should be enticing. Whether you’re offering discounts, products on sale or free shipping, you should be providing your customers with incentives to shop. Most importantly, to secure conversions, your campaign should always incorporate a short, snappy call-to-action which should lead to a landing page or purchasing page. Christmas is a busy period for everyone and so making your customers’ user journey as quick and easy as possible is a huge benefit to them, and to you.
Mobile optimisation
With around 53% of emails being opened on mobile devices, it is crucial that you also optimise your emails for mobile use. Emails should be formatted so that they can be opened on different devices and should be responsive on mobiles so your customers always have a smooth experience.
If you want to have yourself a “Merry Little Christmas”, consider starting your Christmas email campaign today and keep our top tips in mind to optimise your campaign and make this Christmas your most successful yet! Wagada offers a wealth of information on Email Marketing or you can give us a call on 01727 260 187 to find out more.
