10 tips for Christmas email marketing

In this digital era, everything should be processed online, marketing included. Email marketing is beyond excellent to contribute greatly to your marketing campaign. Below are some tips you should know to have a better preparation as well as a better email campaign this holiday shopping season.

1. Assess previous email campaigns

You learn a lot from your experience and your mistakes, indeed; and it is so obvious that you will get a good lesson by analyzing what you did in your previous campaigns and seeing how they performed. All of the email marketing tools have the report function so that you can have a look at the log. Some figures like open rates, click rates, multiple opens, unsubscribes and complaints are important to keep your eyes on. They say many things about your campaign’s performance. Through the statistics, you should note down some main factors which may affect the result. After that, you will be able to figure out what you can work on in the next email marketing campaign by exploiting your advantages and eliminating mistakes

2. Competitors

I know that it may sound negative or unfair to say that you should look how your competitors are doing with their Christmas email marketing campaigns and make yourself a copy. And yes, you shouldn’t do that. What works for your competitors may not work for your business, so just don’t stupidly imitate anything from them. However, having a look at your competitors’ email campaigns can inspire you a lot; also, you can learn or you can improve your own campaign by getting to know more of how the market is doing. You can register or subscribe their newsletter to receive their emails. Try to pay attention to details and get the ideas of the campaign. Once again, you should never imitate, but you learn and make it your own.

3. Subject lines

Your subscribers will be overwhelmed by tons of offers and updates during the festive season. Obviously, to catch their attention is hard as f*ck that within couples of hours, if you do not get their opens, the emails will be flooded among hundreds of others and be forgotten forever.

Hence, subject line is the key factor which decides your open rates. The tip here is to keep it clear and simple yet interesting and eye-catching. In my experience, the subject lines including little cool icons, punchy words, exclamation will be easy to get opened. Also, having subject lines personalized is a good idea to start with. You can consult this article which contains many inspired ideas and statistics about subject lines to optimize them in your email marketing campaigns.

4. Design

Once you get the opens, your mission now is how to keep the email’s content amazing enough. Otherwise, your subscribers will just leave and in a worse scenario, you may unsubscribe your email. Using Email marketing tools which provide you eye-catching templates will cut down your workload yet it is still effective. I’m using Sendinblue and Getresponse and find these tools fantastic, so you can give them a try. Also, you can find here some other tools with outstanding features

5. Email content

Christmas is a busy time for the inbox, and your readers will have no more than several seconds to decide whether they want to keep reading or not. Thus, you should make sure that you’ve got good stuff to tell them. As far as I’m concerned, you should post the most exciting things in the very first lines of the letter; you should also include relevant links, images, gif files or even videos to keep the readers interested in your content. In addition, you can try to personalize the email to make it more friendly.

6. Email length

Don’t make your email look like an endless letter which even when you have such great content and all of the things you share in the mail are good enough to read. People are busy as hell in this festive season. You should make the email as simple and short as possible while including the most important things you want to convey. Other things can be hidden under a Read more button so your readers are able to choose what they want to read. Don’t greedily put everything into only one email, but don’t chop your email campaign into too many separated emails flooded into your subscribers’ inboxes. Sending to many campaigns within this time can be counterproductive indeed, and your subscribers may want to become unsubscribers again. In my experience, your subscribers will be happy if they receive only up to 3 emails per week.

7. Keep in touch with your subscribers

It would be awkward a bit if you recontact with someone you haven’t stay in touch for a while. It can be the same here online, your subscribers will even forget who you are and why they hit subscribe you. The best way to eliminate this is to regularly send them emails and make sure they still want to be in your email list before you start your campaign.

8. A/B testing

A/B testing is a must to optimize your campaign’s effectiveness. Among many selections for the email marketing program, you can use this testing system to directly compare techniques for maximizing open and click rates. I recommend you to have a test on subject lines, link placements, senders, or even special offers

Once again, Sendinblue is one of the tools which supports A/B testing function, you can give it a try

9. Attention to detail

Not a big fan of perfectionism, I think imperfection will make you learn and make more progress in your work. However, we all should be detail-oriented in email marketing campaign. This proves that you’re serious in your work and your subscribers will notice to the effort you put in the emails. Hence, at least don’t make spelling and grammatical mistakes, missing words/images or broken links should be prevented as they will generate negative impression on the readers. My advice is to make sure that you check your campaign at least twice before the sending button is clicked.

10. Plain text

You may think that it’s no need to create plain text versions of your campaigns, but it’s actually a good habit. Using plain text will eliminate the case that your emails will be filtered as spam; in addition, anyone who isn’t able to view HTML emails will be able to see the plain text versions instead.

Above are the 10 useful tips which you should follow to have the best results in your upcoming Christmas email marketing campaign. Winning the festive campaign is hard, it requires a lot of your investment, effort and attention. However, once you do it right, you’ll get far beyond profit; it’s customer loyalty. Learn from Avada Marketing Automation now.

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