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Christmas campaign tips

The end-of-the-year holiday season is an ideal time to dialogue with your contacts and obtain the results in terms of conversion, specifically if your offers respond to the universal issues of this season: not just “What can I get him/her as a gift” but also “What to cook?” or “Where to go on vacation? Or “What to wear on New Year’s Eve?”. Too bad most brands, including your competitors, are taking it all into consideration. The users are particularly over solicited, and probably receive more emails than they usually do.So, how can you make the difference?

As it always does, in e-mail marketing, it all starts from the database.
Holidays are a good time to acquire new contacts from your site, especially if you have offers linked to Christmas. Make the subscription to your newsletter more visible and easier. Offer some promotions only to the newsletter subscribers, so as to award who has already subscribed and motivate those who have not done so yet. Moreover, if the content of our newsletter is really to your advantage, during this period the sharing through the function “send to a friend” could give you great results.
 
With the holidays you will also be able to evaluate  how active your contacts really are.  For example, do you know who purchased or converted last year? In this case you could think of awarding loyalty, offering specific advantages to this segment. Or, have you detected inactive users, that have not opened the emails nor clicked on them during the past few months? Try to make them active with  ad hoc advertising in tune with the season.
 
To be noticed in the inboxes, pay particular attention to the subject of your e-mail,  which will especially determine the opening. Ask yourselves what is the true value of your message, especially thinking of what solutions your offering Christmas users. Gift ideas are the most obvious solution , particularly effective if already segmented. This year,  on American sites we see applications which allow you to find the perfect gift, based on determined criteria.  So, think of it in these terms: budget gifts (10 offers under € 30, € 50, € 100), by target (for him, for her, by age group, etc), by interest or personality.
 
In terms of content, the greatest temptation will be to send messages with dozens of offers with the purpose of making them visible and selling a bit of everything. Your readers will have less time than usual to read your e-mail and decide: your messages will have to be clear and easy to understand. In the email, that contains various offers, it is important to organize the content in well-highlighted various reading levels, to easily distinguish the main message, the offers should be highlighted (for example, with images and/or more details) and at last quick links inviting users to discover the rest of the site.
 
Moreover, during this period you can incentivize multiple sales, because it would be sensible to think that one person will need to purchase several things. So, award who purchases more than one item.
 
Think of resolving the common last minute gifts problem: guarantee delivery time, plan a very last shipping even during Christmas and possibly after, for those who need to shop for gifts after the 25th. 
 
If, for any commercial reasons, you have suddenly decided to increase the frequency of your e-mail, going from one monthly newsletter to weekly messages, the risk you take is to see an increase of the unsubscription rate, or worse even signaling as spam. A solution can be the introduction of a “temporary unsubscribe”:  for example, to the users who have already booked their trip give the possibility of not receiving following offers to the period and subscribe back again in January.
 
In addition, explain why you are sending more messages than before: well, because your offers should not be missed! But it won’t be all over in January!

• Thank the shopper (and flag them so as to create ad hoc operations for them next year), with a simple non commercial Season’s greetings e-mail
• Make your new contacts loyal with a welcome series to better tell who you are and what you do
• Request feedback through a survey so as to understand how you can improve your offer and your communication
• Start thinking about how to organize your program  for next year, in October that is!