Holiday Marketing and Email Content Mistakes to Avoid

October is almost too late to start Holiday promotions but there are ways of ensuring added profits and reduce mistakes.

Here are 8 Steps To Creating An Effective Holiday Marketing Campaign

  1. Start early: Advance planning allows you to make sure that all the elements of your promotion are well-thought through and tested and that you have the resources in place to execute.
  2. Identify your segments: Understanding your audience is critical to any successful marketing strategy, and holiday marketing is no different.  You can segment your audience by customer lifecycle stage or behaviors, persona, and/or specific demographic attributes— like age, geography, and gender.
  3. Choose the right holidays for your customer base: Holiday marketing, especially once fall begins, focus is primarily around Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s.
  4. Create thoughtful offers for your holiday marketing campaign: Start by asking yourself “What is my goal?”  Sometimes what you offer can be an idea (like what to buy someone), a curated experience (like a Pinterest board), educational (like a reminder to make healthy choices), or a limited-time offer.
  5. Create a personal experience for today’s savvy consumer: who expects more than ever before: Marketing automation can help marketers deliver this personal experience from web, to social media, to email, and even across your different ad platforms.
  6. Create a multi-channel plan: Make sure that your campaign is everywhere that your customer is, and if you can understand how your customer is using that channel, you will be able to target your marketing even better.
  7. Reward loyalty: Loyal customers are the bread and butter of any business, plus your best advocates. Use your holiday marketing campaign as a way to reward them by offering exclusives, sneak peeks, and special offers, and then ask them to share.
  8. Have fun: Capture the energy of the season or holiday with your marketing and don’t let the constraints of “what’s been done” define your campaign. The more creative, fun, and innovative you are, the more you will stand out from the rest.

Side-Step These Two Common Holiday Email Content Mistakes

  • Sales and discounts, all day every day: During the holidays, strong sales and promotions can help brands stay competitive. But sales offers in every subject line for weeks on end get as stale as last year’s fruitcake.  By diversifying the messaging stream and offering value beyond just promotions, brands can let their merchandising, editorial content and featured collections draw subscribers down the browsing and purchasing path.
  • Putting the pressure on … turning subscribers off: The holidays can be stressful, both for marketers and consumers. The last thing subscribers want is for a brand to guilt them into creating a perfect holiday or rushing into a purchase. This can put them off of that particular campaign and can even impact their perception of the brand.

Rather than adding to the stress and noise in the inbox, consider a strategy that positions the brand as an ally. Highlight ease, simplicity and convenience to help take the pressure down a notch and reduce subscriber hesitation.