10 Email Tips for a Very Merry (and Profitable) Holiday Season

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10 Email Tips for a Very Merry (and Profitable) Holiday Season

The holiday season is right around the corner. Are you ready with an email-marketing strategy that will maximize engagement, drive revenue, and make the most of the heightened holiday retail opportunities? Check out these trends and tips to help you meet and exceed your e-commerce marketing goals!

Why Are Holiday Emails So Important for E-Commerce Retailers?

Check out some of the latest holiday email statistics in this Yes Lifecycle Marketing’s study, which tracked and compared the performance of 30 major brands’ email campaigns during the third and fourth quarters of 2014 and 2015. This study included such brands as Amazon, Toys R Us, Macy’s, and Target.

  • Holiday retail sales reached $626.1 billion in 2015, a 3% increase compared to the previous year.
  • 13.4% more brands sent holiday-themed emails in 2015 than 2014.
  • The total number of holiday-themed emails sent in 2015 increased, nearly doubling over the previous year.

Results from this study also indicated that the increased volume of emails sent during the holiday season is linked to a corresponding drop in open rates: Year-over-year open rates were higher in the third quarter of 2015 compared to 2014, but 13% lower during the fourth quarter, when email send volume increased by 29%.

Holiday Email Tips to Boost Both Engagement and Revenue

So what can you do to keep your subscribers opening and clicking your emails? Here are some tips to help drive email engagement and give a boost to the revenue generated from your holiday email campaigns:

  1. Update your current triggered email campaigns with festive, holiday-themed design and messaging. This is a quick and easy way to get subscribers in the holiday state of mind. Add seasonal imagery to your triggered email headers, for example, and include such information as holiday gift guides, order and shipping deadlines, and special store hours in your footers. In your welcome emails, feature a promotion available just during the holiday season. Plus, consider adding holiday emojis to your subject lines to help set a holiday mood from the start. (As we discussed in a previous article, subject lines with emojis elicit higher open rates than those without.)
  2. Start priming your subscribers with holiday reminders in early November. And be ready to send your holiday emails about a week before Black Friday and Cyber Monday — two of the biggest online shopping days of the year.
  3. Implement a Green Monday–themed promotion to stand out in holiday inboxes. Similar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Green Monday is another holiday that has been created by the retail industry. It typically falls on the second Monday in December and has been the third largest online shopping day of the year. Yet only 10% of retailers sent emails for Green Monday last year, according to Yes Lifecycle Marketing’s study.
  4. Leverage post-purchase emails during the holiday season. In other words, suggest related products as additions to the gifts that customers already have purchased.
  5. Create a reengagement campaign during the holidays. This is a great way to reignite interest in your brand with customers who haven’t purchased from you in a while. Send a special “missed you” message along with a holiday discount to motivate them to buy again from your company.
  6. Use abandoned search emails to get your holiday marketing message to prospects who are just starting their shopping journey. The time when prospects are beginning to search for a product is the key moment for influencing their purchase decision — hopefully before they have a chance to check out competitors’ similar products.
  7. Optimize the cadence and frequency of your triggered emails. For example, you may find that it’s more effective to shorten the launch of each of your abandoned-cart campaign emails during the holiday season, as well as to increase the number of abandoned-cart emails that you send.
  8. Segment your email list to help keep your messages personalized and relevant. This could include segmenting subscribers based on purchase history, demographic information, and past response behaviors (e.g., on what types of product information they’ve previously clicked).
  9. Optimize for mobile. In the Yes Lifecycle Marketing’s study, brands that optimized the mobile path-to-purchase were among those that generated the biggest order increases compared to the previous year. Click here for mobile best practices to ensure that your emails are optimized for mobile users.
  10. Extend your holiday email campaigns beyond Christmas Day. This will help capture sales from prospects and customers who have holiday gift cards to redeem.

Need help developing and implementing an effective holiday email-marketing strategy? Contact FulcrumTech today and we’ll show you how to optimize the performance and return on investment from your email campaigns during the holidays — and year-round, too!


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