10 rules for getting the most out of your holiday emails

It’s that time of year once again. Those in the online sector are gearing up for late nights at the office and planning for big returns from the increased growth in holiday ecommerce.

The end-of-year holiday period certainly helps companies generate a lot of buzz and many serious discussions revolve around holiday campaign planning and how to best market seasonal deals to the general public.

Email marketing is becoming increasingly vital to the holiday success of any business. Just days after Halloween, many retail emails have already begun including some references to the holiday season, and within a few weeks, our inboxes will be ringing to the sound of Jingle Bells.

Many people make a point of planning out holidays early — sometimes even as early as mid-year. Why start so early? The flexibility of electronic communication often spoils us by providing the opportunity to send campaigns at the last-minute. Unfortunately, coordinating email messaging and other communications well requires a lot of planning. So when it comes to effective holiday campaigning, the sooner you can set a plan in motion the better.

Here is how to get the most out of your emails this season:

1. Review past campaigns:
   The most important step in planning your holiday email campaign is reviewing what happened last year. Examining your 2010 holiday email performance is a great way to prepare for the upcoming season. And doing it now gives you enough time to address new challenges you’ll be facing and new opportunities. Look at what worked last year and which communications resulted in the greatest sales. Find out what your best moves were and repeat them.

2. Segment pre-emptively:
   Take advantage of the most easily targeted consumers, who are the people who bought merchandise last year and would therefore be fairly likely to buy the same type of products again. Target past buyers with additional promotional emails focused on the kind of items they have bought before.

3. Grow your list:
   The holiday season presents great opportunities for reaching out to new people, so use this time to grow your email subscriber list. For online purposes, make sure you have email sign-up forms on both your website and social media pages. If you are a retailer, ask people to sign up for emails during checkout. Think about offering an extra holiday-related incentive for signing up for your email list.

4. Slow and steady wins the race:
   The holiday season lasts a long time, often starting in October and not ending well until after the turn of the year in January. Develop a master calendar with specific time-of-year trends and areas of interests to ensure a good presence in the inbox. This will let you co-ordinate well with communication efforts in other channels.

5. Restrain your mailing:
   However enthused you feel about a holiday email campaign, avoid the temptation to email too often, at least to your entire list. Although very engaged customers might want to see your messages daily, most will not want to hear from your business more than a maximum of three times per week.

6. Email with variation:
   Communications that feature the same offers or come at the same time every week will quickly become invisible to the average person. Make sure to include a variety of offers at different times to keep the consumer interested in what you have to sell and thinking about what other unique deals you might be bringing down their chimney.

7. Get creatively festive:
   Seasonal imagery and content should be part of your customer engagement strategy and might just reinvigorate interest in your business from consumers. Involve your creative department in the campaign process, or alternately make use of the extensive free newsletter template libraries offered by major ESPs.

8. Trading hours:
   The holidays will probably bring some changes in your schedule. If you have a professional office, you might be at your desk less. If you’re in retail, you will most likely be opening earlier and staying open until later. Either way, people should know when they can reach you. Send out the schedule notification a few weeks beforehand so that they can plan accordingly.

9. Purposeful happy holidays:
   If you want to send your customers a holiday greeting, make sure you don’t waste their time. All too often businesses really just add to the inbox clutter when sending emails with a simple holiday greeting. Instead, one solution is to give your well-wishes more value by offering a coupon, a free gift or something that your subscribers would cherish.

10. Deadline reminders:
    It may still be a while off, but there are only so many calendar days left before Santa mounts his sleigh. Last minute shoppers need to know how last-minute they can actually be. Figure out what the latest day is you can ship something which will reach its destination by Christmas and let people know. Additionally, your emails should show a clear countdown with how many days customers have left to place an order.

A successful holiday email campaign helps you not only get the most out of the end of the current year, but paves the way for your success in the following year.

Image: Giorgio Montersino