Your email marketing channel is likely one of your top performing ecommerce traffic sources, so it’s imperative that you maximize your email marketing strategies during the holiday shopping season. There are several areas of your email marketing channel which can be addressed including the following:
- Email HTML Creatives – Launch a series of beautiful holiday-themed email offers for: Pre-Holiday, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then leading up to Christmas, and then Post-Holiday Deals to finish out the year. (Our designers can whip these up in a day or 2 if you need HTML emails turned around quickly). Increasing your email sending frequency is very advisable during November and December. Also, make sure you are using opt-in boxes (or spinning wheels) on the website to increase email collection from your increased holiday website traffic. You should be able to really increase your email list when your website’s holiday traffic increases, which feeds into increasing sales and growing for the following year.
- Test Subject Lines – Refining and testing subject lines on each blast is an absolute must during the holiday shopping season. Include first name in the subject line whenever possible. “Here are the best deals of the holiday season, Nancy!” Make sure to emphasize deep discounts and other timely promotions. Keep your subject lines as short as possible and stress urgency. Most ESP’s will allow you to A/B test the subject lines on a per blast basis, sending 10% to A and 10% to B, then send the rest to winner. This is a great way to A/B test on the fly and highly recommended!
- Responsive/Mobile Designed HTML Emails – these are mobile friendly emails and a must for the holiday season since more than 70% of email openers are doing it on smartphones. (We are able to design and code responsive emails, just let me know). This means abandoning 2 column layouts and going with a graphic that will look great on the smartphone with a nice, big call to action button.
- Email Platform – Make sure you have a well-performing, well-delivering email marketing platform that segments your database and personalized offers where appropriate. If you send out to a larger size list, you might want to check out Ongage.com which helps companies maximize their email delivery by rotating the ESPs being used to send your email blasts, and keeps the deliverability at the highest level possible. Just a couple of percentage points can make all the difference in the revenue from the email blasts.
- Email Frequency – I recommend daily deal emails and weekly seasonal emails into the holiday season, so you have to plan and design numerous promotional emails to send out in succession. This is the time of year that you can get away with daily (if not more than 1 per day) email blasts to your lists, so take advantage of it, but with a good strategy in place.
- Don’t be shy – Email is the #1 revenue generator for ecommerce, so make sure not to under-do it. Make sure to increase email collection both on the website with pop-ups (or spinning wheels), sweepstakes entries, and try Facebook Lead Ads to increase email subscribers to your list (inquire with us if you would like an agency to run these campaigns for you).
- ArcaMax Publishing – this is the highest quality 3rd party party email marketing company you can use to drive traffic to your website during the holiday shopping season. They have great lists if you’re looking for consumers. Contact: Scott Wolf and mention Experience Advertising, Inc. sent you!
- ConvertCart.com – this is the tool/service I recommend using to handle all of you initial optin email collection, automated shopping cart abandonment emails, and browser abandonment emails, which are all proven strategies to increase email collection from website traffic as well as boosting conversion rate overall on the website. ConvertCart.com is a managed service, which has many additional ecommerce tools to boost conversion rate on the website. I highly recommend taking a look at their tools/service. Mention Evan Weber with Experience Advertising sent you to get a better deal from ConvertCart.
These are some great ways to boost up your email marketing channel for the holiday shopping season, something we are very well versed in doing here at Experience Advertising, Inc. If you need assistance designing, deploying, or strategizing for your email marketing channel let us know! Thanks and have a great Q4 and beyond!
