Holiday Email Campaigns – Tips to Excel in 2021

Holiday season sales have seen a steady rise every year since 2002 except for the great recession in 2008. Speculations were made last year that the pandemic could have adverse effects on the eCommerce Holiday season 2020. However, to the surprise of the retailers, the stats represent quite the opposite. Despite the global restrictions on the retail industry and the disrupted supply chain, the Holiday sales in 2020 were more than double the average YoY growth of the previous year. This proves that shoppers have built lasting habits regarding online holiday spending, and the trend will probably continue this year.

The retail sales throughout the Holidays 2020 witnessed an increase at 8.3% to $789.4 billion in comparison to $729.1 billion in 2019. eCommerce sales are partially responsible for this surge, accounting for 23.9% at $209 billion. One way to leverage this massive opportunity is to tap your audience using holiday email marketing. A well-designed holiday email campaign can lead your brand to a prime place to increase holiday sales in 2021.

Using various holiday email ideas and examples, this detailed guide will help you cover as much ground as possible to soften the battlefield before the holiday season.

While all marketing channels pose certain benefits, email marketing for Holidays has its perks. Email campaigns provide the perfect opportunity to have the highest ROI, $42 for every $1 spent, compared to all other marketing channels.

Emails are a cost-effective way to engage with a vast potential customer base where you can leverage unique, branded, and personalized content to capture their attention. You can use email marketing to distribute content and promotions and increase the rate of customer acquisition and retention rate while enhancing brand awareness.

If email marketing can harness such power for you, can you imagine what holiday email campaigns are capable of?

• You can reach out to a considerable number of people with warm and personalized messaging by sparking interest and excitement for the upcoming Holiday season.
• You can generate leads by encouraging them to think that your eCommerce brand is the solution to their holiday shopping needs.
• Holiday email campaigns can heighten the product awareness that you want to promote.
• A hard-hitting and strategically planned holiday email marketing campaign can increase the average order value, maximize conversions and generate more significant profits while growing sales.

Overall, holiday email marketing can help you make huge profits off of the holiday period, and this article intends to tell just how to do that.

People are more receptive to holiday emails as holiday shopping is prioritized on their lists during this time of the year. So why not take advantage of this? Focus on increasing email open rates, click-through rates, and conversions by sending them relevant content.

Email automation is an integral part of reaching these milestones by using automated workflows to reach your target audience. It can help you focus on:

• • Being noticed above the noise
  • Having one-way conversations with customers
  • Equipping your brand with a unique voice that resonates with your audience
  • Nurturing long-term relationships with your customers that go beyond the holiday season and encourage consumer loyalty

For all the above reasons and more, you should think about leveraging automated holiday emails in the following categories to gather attention and improve customer engagement. 

1. Welcome Emails

Rigby used this welcome email to thank the customer for signing up and giving them an opportunity to get free shipping on their first order.

2. Promotional Emails 

Go Pro has used a direct monetary value as a discount. This will for sure catch some glances for people wanting the product but looking for a good time to make the purchase.

3. Abandon Cart Emails

Giving a personalized tone to the abandoned carts is one way to capture the shopper’s attention. It also shows that you care. 

4. Product and Inventory Updates

Got a new range of products or a product update for your customers? Why not flaunt it with style and let them know about it. 

5. Special Discounts/Events Announcements

Special discounts on special days and events are a great way to lead your customers to conversion. Who doesn’t like discounts?

6. Free Shipping Emails

Everyone wants to save a few bucks on shipping, especially when most of the shopping is now done online. Nobody could have said it better than Queen Garnet.

7. Customer Surveys and Feedback

Ask your customers to give valuable feedback and insights about your products and services. These will prove to be an asset when it comes to strategizing holiday email campaigns.

8. Holiday Limited Time Offers

Lead your customers to conversion, make them believe that this is the best time to buy. 

9. Account Renewals/Reactivations

Show your customers the benefits of subscription/account renewals. You can embed promotions to go with it to lure your customers in.

10. Upsells and Cross-Sells Emails

Upsell and cross-sell emails can help you increase the conversion rate while giving your customers relevant product recommendations.

You can set up a holiday email campaign once, and email automation will take care of the rest. This will save you ample time and resources and help you clean up your email address list and keep it updated for every holiday email campaign.

Think about your target market and where your target audience might come from. If you are catering to the US retail market, it will make sense to mark the holiday season from late October to the first half of January as the busiest shopping season. These few months are bound to become a significant opportunistic window for your brand. The holiday emails you send before or during this time can garner staggering benefits in consumer engagements, sales, and revenue. It would be wise to let your audience know about holiday limited-time offers, special promotions during particular holidays, and other benefits that might fit into their holiday shopping requisites.

So, make sure you know your holidays and plan your holiday season email marketing campaign accordingly. 

• Halloween

• Thanksgiving

• Black Friday

• Cyber Monday

• Christmas

• New Year

Once you know what holidays are relevant to your brand, you can start planning your holiday email campaign and create a schedule that prevents email fatigue among your audience.

We have taken a look at what works best for retailers, along with some creative holiday email ideas. It is time to move our attention towards specific holiday email strategies that are in tune with your eCommerce holiday planning.

• Emphasize on Audience Segmentation for Holiday Email Campaigns

The key is to send the right message to the right audience at the right time. Now is not the time to send generic mass emails and get drowned in the ocean of promotional emails your customers get every day. Segmentation helps you understand the requirements of your target audience, and you can deliver personalized content, product recommendations, and promotions to each of the segments. 82% of marketers have witnessed increased email open rates using email personalization, yet 70% are short of using it. Hence, creating email messages tailored to the customer’s demographics, interests, and purchase history is advisable. For this very reason, audience segmentation is essential.   

• Create Unique and Personalized Holiday Content

Once your audience is segmented, it is time to cash on the needs of your customers. There are several ways to leverage audience segmentation to create unique and personalized holiday content. You can improve audience engagement with holiday-specific emails to connect with them on a personal level. It is known that personalized emails lead to six times more conversions than generic messages. You can use dynamic content to deliver different messages to different subscribers based on their demographics, interests, occasions, and purchasing actions. To establish a personal connection, you can also address your subscribers with their first name with a warm and human-sounding tone. 

• Make Your Holiday Email Campaigns Mobile-Friendly

With the majority of the population using smartphones, mobile shopping has become immensely popular. So has mobile email reading. 46% of all emails are opened on mobile devices. It is evident that emails today should be optimized for mobile viewing, or else they would be ignored. Hence, even if your holiday email content is best in the industry, you can still be overlooked by your target audience if your emails cannot be opened on mobile devices. This will eventually result in a missed opportunity to boost customer engagement and, ultimately, conversions. Moreover, according to industry experts, mobile sales will account for 44% of total eCommerce sales, reaching $314 billion in 2020. Supporting this forecast, the busiest shopping days like Cyber Monday saw a steep incline in mobile online spending of 39%, i.e., 47% YoY.

• Write Catchy Subject Lines to Stand Out from the Crowd

Subject lines are first soldiers in email campaign effectiveness. To drive an efficient holiday email marketing campaign, your subject lines should be hard-hitting, on-point, precise, creative, and eye-catching to improve open rates. You can use magic words mentioning things people usually think about during this time of the year, like promotions, discounts, free shipping, limited time, last-minute, exclusive, Season’s greetings, Christmas, cheer, thank you, and so forth. You can also personalize the subject line by adding the recipient’s name, which will likely increase the open rate by 26%. Another way is to use emojis. They can increase the email open rate by 45%. There are other ways to cash on subject lines too, so go on, make a lasting impact, enhance your brand awareness, and be awesome.

• Publicize Cyber Monday & Black Friday Sales in Advance

Cyber Monday is one of the most significant shopping days for eCommerce retail, alongside Black Friday. However, last year showed a different trend of extending these single-day shopping sales to week-long sales. Many retailers were out there starting the sales earlier than traditionally and growing their marketing promotions via email. This also led the customers to visit eCommerce stores well in advance to prepare and investigate their purchases. This clearly indicates that promoting these big sales as soon as possible is good for business as it gives the shoppers ample time to prepare to shop.

• Send a Holiday Gift Guide

As the holiday season approaches, many people have reported having holiday gift anxiety. It centers around the fear of not knowing what to gift to loved ones. You can connect to the customers by sharing holiday gift guides to solve their problems. You can distribute these gift guides across your email list. You can even send multiple gift guides, each made for specific types of shoppers based on prices, relationships, Interests, age group, and product type. Leverage on Last Minute Offers and Deals.

• Divert the Click-Through Traffic to a Dedicated Purchase Page

You do not want to craft a winning holiday email and let that all go in vain after people click through. So, it would be best if you send all the click-through traffic to a dedicated purchase page rather than the homepage. It is consumer psychology, if a shopper clicks on the order now button CTA on the email, they should not have to go through the pain of navigating to the product of their choice. Instead, you should create a dedicated landing page for your email campaign, leading the shopper to conversion. This will help you reduce the friction in the conversion process.

Final Words About Holiday Email Campaign 2021

Email marketing is undeniably important and can become a high-converting asset for your business, especially during the holiday season. Segment your audience, personalize the email content, ensure to account for mobile compatibility and leverage the busiest holidays to drive maximum conversions. Strategize for the holiday season and select the right holiday email marketing tools to suit your business needs. You can also collaborate with the right digital commerce partner to help generate and execute eCommerce holiday marketing ideas, email or otherwise.

It is time to spread cheer and set the gear to get the results you want.