Holiday Email Marketing I: Getting ready and role models

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on October 07, 2008

The end-of-year "holiday" season is a time of promise and challenge for email marketers. Wallets open up and inboxes fill up: the competition for attention affects us all, whether retailer or not.

I picked the brains of four email and ecommerce experts to come up with advice on how to get the best out of year-end messages. You'll get their insights in four posts over the coming week or two.

Today's first installment looks at your holiday email preparations and some good campaign examples from last year.

What should you do now for holiday sales success?

1. Get everything else ready now

The holiday season is not the time to make changes to basic designs and processes. That all needs to be done in advance. The prospect of holiday sales should provide enough incentive to get all those little improvements done before October is over.

Chad White, Director of Retail Insights at the Email Experience Council and author of the Retail Email blog says, "You should certainly wrap up any big bang email redesigns by mid-October or so, as well as put together any holiday-themed email template designs."

Luc Vezina, head of marketing for email service provider Campaigner (disclosure: a sponsor) adds:

"Now is also the time for software and creative retooling or to conduct any testing that might be too risky to perform during the peak season."

2. Step up email address acquisition efforts

List growth is good any time of year, but holiday promotions are great for conversions and for attracting new subscribers. Luc notes:

"Entice new subscribers with the promise of additional discounts and advance notification of holiday promotions."

3. Plan your holiday campaign calendar

4. Start building and testing seasonal emails

According to DJ Waldow, email marketing account manager at email service provider Bronto, while you might not be able to test holiday creative and subject lines directly, there's nothing to prevent you beginning the process internally...for example, "with your family and friends."

It's particularly important to ensure that offers are immediately clear to recipients, as attention spans are challenged by retailer email overload. Linda Bustos, ecommerce consultant at Elastic Path Software and author of the Get Elastic ecommerce blog says:

"Make sure your emails are always optimized for images off and maximize the power of the pre-header. No matter how fabulous your creative and offers are, if they're not "in your face" enough, the message may never get through."

5. Review your previous efforts

Chad says, "I'd recommend doing a full post-mortem on your holiday campaigns last year and note what worked and didn't and work that into your planned campaigns for this year."

6. Review other people's efforts

There's no shame in drawing inspiration from others. DJ suggests we wear a consumer hat and review the email that hit our inbox last holiday season:

"What did YOU like? What emails did you open? Click? Convert? Which ones did you delete without reading? Which ones annoyed you?"

So what are our experts' favorites from 2007?

Winning holiday email campaigns

Linda picked out a post-Christmas email from Drugstore.com with a "New Year Resolution" theme. Here's an extract:

example holiday email

She cites three key points that help the email work...

1. "December is typically a time when you focus on buying for others, and January when you shift gears to focus on yourself: your fitness, weight, health, appearance and breaking bad habits."

2. "It's also a time when you're typically broke. So Drugstore.com's up-to 40% off sale on personal necessities was very relevant."

3. "It also speaks customer language like Look My Best and Be Healthy rather than linking to Beauty and Health categories."

DJ Waldow is a fan of Nascar's "12 days, 12 deals" holiday campaign. He and fellow Brontonian Julie Waite explain why in this video review, with DJ saying:

"A theme-based or series campaign where I know for the next 11 days, the first thing I do when I get in in the morning is I'm going to be looking for that Nascar email to kind of get my fix."

Chad White has a few good examples for us...

"TigerDirect's Pink Friday campaign, which donated a portion of sales to help fight breast cancer, really caught my attention."

Why?

"I'm sure it was in part all the pink in their design, rather than all the red and green being used by others. But the charity tie-in made sense given that Christmas is a time of giving and that Breast Cancer Awareness Month had been the month before."

Chad also highlights a couple of sweepstakes that stood out...

"Old Navy's wish list sweepstakes campaign was innovative in that it encouraged customers to browse and create wish lists in exchange for a chance to win all the items on their wish list. That's a sweepstakes that really drives product and brand engagement."

"The other sweeps was Neiman Marcus's clickthrough sweeps, where they gave you a sweeps entry just for clicking through the email to look at their Big 100 Gifts List. While it didn't drive deep engagement like Old Navy's sweeps, it was super easy...just clickthrough and you're entered to win. No forms to fill out."

And he also puts in a vote for Harry & David's Mr. Pear Head emails: "They made me smile every time I saw them."

Next installment: How can you stand out and should you really send more emails in Q4?

More on holiday email | Tags: holiday email marketing, seasonal marketing, holiday ecommerce

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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