The second half of the year brings with it a sumptuous number of holidays and festivals. As a marketer, you must try to turn every event into a sales opportunity to uplift your bottom line. This needs planning your holiday calendar. And don’t just plan it, let your customers know about it too, with an email like the following:
Such calendar emails serve as a SAVE THE DATE email, which is a must for your campaign as well as your customers. You can add some of the festive days yourself, like extending Cyber Monday to Cyber Tuesday, to increase sales.
PLAN YOUR EMAILS
You must send out 3 emails per festival. Let’s take Thanksgiving day on November 26th for example-
- 1st email – to introduce the sale event (on November 16)
- 2nd email – to showcase discounted products (on November 20)
- 3rd email – to announce the sale and redirect customers to the sales landing page (on the day of the sale, November 22-24)
Simultaneously, do send out mobile app notifications to those who have downloaded and installed your ecommerce app.
90% of emails opened and clicked between Black Friday and Cyber Monday were sent the prior week.
DON’T FORGET TO LOOK BACK
Since a lot of festivals are falling in a narrow span of time, sending 3 emails per festival and 3 notifications per sale can mean a lot of annoyance to your audience. This may lead to overlooking of some great offers and disabling app notifications, which may prove fatal for your campaign. Hence, you need to decide which festivals are most important for your audience.
For this, you must keep an eye on the upcoming trends and also use your last year’s sales report.
Once you have finalized your targeted festivals and sales, send out these emails to your audience to keep them engaged and buying:
#1 SALE EMAIL
Come up with creative names like Amazon’s Appiness Sale, Procrastinator’s Sale, Last Minute Steals.
Keep the main focus of this email on the deal.
#2 GIFT GUIDE EMAIL
Showcase your collection by categorizing them in a way that suits the personalities of people and helps the one gifting cut through the confusion and choose a thoughtful gift. For example, gifts for a sporty father, gifts for a techy cousin, gifts for a Fashionista sister, gifts under $25, etc.
Maintain the focus on helping out the recipient pick a better gift.
#3 HOLIDAY eCARD
Sending out a holiday eCard shows you care for your customers.
Do not offer discounts on forwarding the emails and keep the focus on sending out your warm wishes so that they can be forwarded by the customer to his friends and family without a thought. This, in turn, helps strengthen your customer base and creates brand awareness.
#4 THANK YOU EMAIL
When a customer places an order, send your heartiest thanks to him along with an order confirmation email. This helps boost your brand trust and goodwill.
As a token of thanks, you can also offer accessories for the purchased product at a discounted price to increase chances of up-sells and cross-sells.
#5 SALE EXTENDED EMAIL
Not everyone would be able to decide on an item and place an order in time before the sale of the day ends. Sending out an extended hours or extended day email gives you the opportunity to convert the customer who missed out on the great offers for any reason.
Send an email that clearly showcases the extended sale event and highlights the discount offered. If possible, keep a site-wide discount to get more conversions.
Make the discount code as visible as possible and clickable, one that takes the customer directly to the sales landing page.
#6 EVERYDAY DEAL EMAIL
During the festive season, it’s essential to keep your customers engaged everyday. To make them come to your webstore everyday, you can start something like “today’s steals” and hide under an email CTA, so that when the curious customer clicks on it, he is taken to the sales page where certain products are available at additional discounts.
Keep the design of the email fairly consistent over the days and send it at a specific time each day.
#7 PERSONALIZED OFFER EMAIL
Segment your customer database and based on their purchase history and browsing patterns and preferences, craft a set of personalized emails that focuses on selling off certain product categories.
#8 ALL AROUND SALE EMAIL
Ecommerce stores these days are opening up physical stores and physical stores are making the products available online too. If you are one of the above two, you must send out an email that highlights the fact that you have a sale on all possible locations, online and offline.
#9 SPECIAL PRODUCT EMAIL
Every store has a star product that it wants to sell in maximum quantity. Such star products require separate emails where only the product and its benefits are displayed.
Make sure the product you are promoting through such an email appeals to the masses and can be used by anyone, and also looks nice as a gift for someone.
You’ll be sending out promotional emails, cart abandonment emails and notification emails like you and every other marketer does every year. Let this year be the year of fresh change. Modify your emails and surprise and engage your audience by emailing them in different formats.
All the best!
This article was first published on TargetingMantra’s Blog.
