Golden guidelines for Holiday season email marketing

What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving? We all know one thing brands are most thankful for. Email!!
With Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, emails have a lot of potential to get people talking and engaging with your brand during the holiday season.

When it comes to creating holiday mailer campaigns these are some fool Golden Guideline techniques that help build customer engagement:

Holiday coupons

Offer your customer exclusive holiday coupons to help them get value for their buys. It is a win-win situation. You make a great sale and your customer gets a great discount for their purchases. A better way to provide holiday coupons is to provide people custom coupons.

Check out their purchase and click through history and map out which products they are most inclined towards. These also help you achieve re-target your audience thus killing two birds with one stone.

Personalization

Personalization changes the context of your holiday mailer, by adding the personal touch it makes them more than just your regular campaign mailers.

Enriching customer loyalty

Send your wishes too – Sure you’re planning to make some good sales this holiday season and that’s great. But, don’t forget; this is the holiday season. Send you customers your good wishes for the holiday season. You VIP customers deserve it. You could also send over content related to the holiday, maybe a pictorial representation of some of the popular holiday.

Create a hype

Who said you can only send holiday mailers only a few days before the holiday season? Send mailers ahead of time and give a sneak peek into the offers and sales. If you send the holiday mailers exactly on date you will be competing with thousands of others for the customer’s attention. Hook them way before. Create an excitement in your audience and sustain even a few days after the holiday.

Make it a social event

Everyone loves the holiday season. So why not make your holiday mailers an occasion to connect people? Ask your customers to share the holiday mailers. The more they share the news of your offers the more credit points they get off your store.

Tell them about Black Friday

Statistics indicate that many customers would like to know about your Black Friday sales in advance. Sure, Black Friday sales are only for the retail stores, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tell them about the offers through mailers. If you have retail stores across the nation, send out mailers to audiences segmented city-wise. Organize a competition for the folks in each city and issue extra credit points.

Cyber Monday Wish list

Coming to the online counterpart of Black Friday, Cyber Monday is the best time to send emails. Everyone knows that. But here’s where you can spin a twist. Have people stock up items into their “Special Cyber Monday Wish list”. During Cyber Monday, you can send a mail with offers on these items alone as a mailer. How about a direct ‘call to action’ to initiate transaction for those items right in the mail? A quick sale technique for your Cyber Monday sale!

Gifting options

The holiday season gives an excellent opportunity to provide customers with gifting options for their loved ones. You could generate categories and provide specific offers for the same. Another incentive you can offer is shipping within 48 hours if possible. For those slackers who wait up till the last minute to look for gifts, this is a great incentive. Here are a few possible categories for the gift session: budget gifts, romantic gifts, children’s gifts, holiday themed gifts etc.

Post sales too you can continue engagement with those who purchased. Have them post the gifts they selected, or flaunt their purchases on your brand’s social media page. Ask them to send in pictures of them donning the dresses or rocking it in their new boots. Invoke a sense of community with your brand’s audience.

Top image via Miel Van Opstal Holidaydeal image via Ben