Holiday Email Teasers—3 Tips for Driving Holiday E-Commerce Sales
At FulcrumTech, we have a little trick up our sleeves for dramatically driving up holiday email conversion rates: holiday teasers. Check out these tips for creating holiday teaser emails, and give your e-commerce sales a big lift during the holiday season.
Why Add a Teaser Email to Your Holiday Email Campaigns?
Email send volume significantly spikes during holidays. That means your subscribers’ inboxes are being flooded with promotional emails, especially during Cyber Week. The following are some holiday marketing stats from 2016 that demonstrate the growing trend of shopping online during the holidays:
- On Thanksgiving Day, digital revenue grew by 26% and traffic by 22% compared to last year.
- Mobile phones accounted for 56% of the traffic and 36% of online orders on Thanksgiving Day. In terms of traffic to retail websites, mobile phones also dominated each day of Cyber Week (Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday).
- On Black Friday, U.S. e-commerce revenue hit a record $3.34 billion, a year-over-year growth rate of 21.6%.
- This year, Cyber Monday also hit a new record high: $3.45 billion was spent online, which was 12.1% more than in 2015.
- Cyber Monday mobile sales totaled $1.07 billion, a 34% increase over last year.
- As far as online Cyber Week incentives, the discount rate went up only slightly over last year, reaching an average of 25% off and 83% of orders shipped for free.
As inbox clutter continues to grow thanks to more and more happy holiday emails sent each year, we’ve found that sending a teaser email several days ahead of the actual holiday can help our clients’ holiday email campaigns stand out. Teaser emails work to build anticipation and excitement for the upcoming special holiday campaigns among your subscriber base. As a result, subscribers are more apt to open your holiday promotion. And most importantly, those subscribers who actually open your happy holidays emails are “primed”—and, thus, more likely to make a purchase.
How Effective Are Holiday Teaser Emails?
To give you an idea of just how effective a holiday teaser email can be for your holiday email marketing, here are some results achieved from a 2016 Cyber Monday holiday email to customers that FulcrumTech designed and implemented for one of our consumer-products e-commerce clients:
- 27% unique open rate for the holiday teaser email
- 26% unique open rate for the Cyber Monday promotional email
- 238% improvement in revenue over last year’s Cyber Monday campaign
- 31 times return on investment (ROI).
As these results indicate, the teaser email may not have gotten a higher percentage of subscribers to open the holiday emails; however, the subscribers who did open the Cyber Monday email were ready to take action—make a purchase and have a positive impact on the revenue generated from the Cyber Monday campaign. (To provide some context, the Cyber Monday email campaign that we implemented for this client in 2015 was the company’s biggest sales day to date, exceeding the campaign’s stretch goal by three-fold. So, we were comparing the 2016 results to an already high-performing campaign.)
Marketing Tips for Crafting Your Own Creative Promotional Ideas for Holiday Email Teasers
The following are our three top tricks of the trade for designing holiday teasers that drive conversions:
- Send the teaser email about one week prior to the actual holiday. So, if you’re running a Cyber Monday promotion, for example, send your teaser email on the Monday or Tuesday before Thanksgiving. This gets your teaser email into subscribers’ inboxes before they’re too inundated with holiday advertising campaigns. Plus, it primes your subscribers to watch for the offer to come.
- Capitalize on the two major levers of holiday teasers: offer and urgency.
- Be sure that your holiday offer is amazing. Offering the same holiday promo ideas that are typically available yearlong just won’t do.
- Make the special offer available for a limited time only. A Cyber Monday deal that extends for an entire week is less likely to drive immediate conversions compared to a true, one-day deal. For a good happy holidays email sample that capitalizes on offer and urgency, check out the Cyber Monday email sales campaign from Amazon featured in FulcrumTech’s Get the Click series.
- Create some mystery about the offer in your teaser. In other words, don’t tell subscribers exactly what the offer is in the teaser email. Use phrases such as “never done before” and “exclusive deal” to help build excitement about your brand, as well as anticipation for the holiday promotional email.
Important Dates to Keep in Mind for Your 2017 Holiday Email Campaigns
When it comes to planning holiday promotions for your happy holidays emails, here are the primary dates to keep in mind for your 2017 holiday email campaign calendar:
- Nov. 23: Thanksgiving
- Nov. 24: Black Friday
- Nov. 25: Small Business Saturday
- Nov. 27: Cyber Monday
- Nov. 28: Giving Tuesday
- Dec. 11: Green Monday
- Dec. 12: Start of Hanukkah
- Dec. 15: Free Shipping Day
- Dec. 24: Christmas Eve
- Dec. 25: Christmas Day
- Dec. 26: Start of Kwanzaa
- Dec. 31: New Year’s Eve
- Jan. 1: New Year’s Day
Integrating Your Email Marketing and Social Media Channels to Help Extend the Reach of Your Holiday Email Campaigns
As you’re doing your email marketing planning for the holiday season—including Thanksgiving promotion ideas and Christmas advertising ideas—be sure to integrate your email and social media marketing. In other words, promote the same holiday email marketing campaign ideas on your social media networks (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), including using similar content and offers as found in your holidays emails.
For more information about how to effectively integrate your email marketing and social media marketing channels, be sure to read a feature article on the topic that ran in a previous issue of NewsLever: “7 Tips for Integrating Email and Social Media Marketing.”
Looking for More Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Holiday Email Campaigns?
As you put the final touches on your holiday marketing campaign strategy, be sure to check out the following FulcrumTech articles that offer more tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your holiday email campaigns. From using pop-ups to help grow your email list, to using predictive analytics for personalizing your happy holidays emails, to creating a holiday gift guide for driving more sales, you’ll find some great holiday marketing ideas to help capture your customers’ attention and give a big boost to your holiday sales and revenue:
- “8 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your 2017 Holiday Email Campaigns”
- “10 Email Tips for a Very Merry (and Profitable) Holiday Season”
In addition, click here to see some outstanding holiday email examples and sample holiday messages. Compiled by Shopify, these holiday email designs sent by retailers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday will provide you with some November marketing ideas for creative email campaigns.
No matter the holiday shopping season or event—whether it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Mother’s Day, or Halloween—FulcrumTech can help you design and implement the perfect holiday teasers, happy holiday email templates, holiday email banners, holiday newsletter ideas for businesses, discount offer email templates, successful marketing campaigns examples, and more to boost engagement and ROI for all your holiday email campaigns. Contact us and get started on creating the best holiday email campaigns today!