Holidays and Email Marketing

Published in

The Sendloop Blog

11 min readNov 9, 2017

An article about holiday emailing with some useful advice and interesting facts by Yalin Karabey

The winter is coming!

Holiday items lining the shelves, sales signboards, huge gift boxes, colourful wrappers and ribbons, shiny confetti raining and glitter flying around, a singing & chiming congrats card, flying deer, fat old men dressed in red, a few little green elves, old pine trees, snowflakes and the inboxes filled with cheer, smileys, emojis and invites… It’s that time of the year again; the holiday season has arrived with the winter starting an intense period of shopping leading to seasonal promotions, themed sales campaigns, coupons and exclusive offers on the marketer and retailer’s side for celebrations.

In this article, we are going to analyze the ways and benefits of holiday email marketing –which still stands to be the best method of reaching consumers for their special days & holiday celebrations.

We’ll be covering some tips and tricks about email marketing for the holidays with the assistance of Sendloop, an enterprise level email marketing automation platform for you and your business to create & send beautiful holiday emails and newsletters — by yourself, without the assistance of any IT professional or a third party software.

The One-Man-Army of Holiday Emailing

With nearly two-thirds of all emails being opened on a mobile device, email marketing is still one of the best tools that assists startups, brands,
e-commerces or internet businesses to take full advantage of the rapidly growing popularity of mobile technology; which by the way is pretty much the snowball effect itself!

All you’re going to need to create an effective holiday campaign is you, yourself and an effective emailing newsletter platform such as Sendloop!
I know that sometimes email marketing may sound and look complicated but on the contrary, it’s a very simple, affordable, efficient and profitable marketing method compared to its many other demanding and expensive peers. Shorty; once you have the right tools, holiday emailing is a one man job, hence the slogan: You + Sendloop: The One-Man-Army Of Email Marketing

Why Email Marketing?

People do business with people or businesses they know, like, and trust; and emailing gives you the ability to build this steady credibility by sharing helpful, beneficial, informative and engaging content with your audience.

When you think about ways of effective, smart and snappy ways to increasing your sales and growing your business by reaching better & bigger audiences; the word opportunity cannot be defined better than the holiday emailing for the email marketer! Why? Because email marketing gives you the chance to reach audiences where they are, and in a place they visit at least a few times everyday: Their inboxes! Plus the holiday season is so busy with events, invites, coupons and special offers that the smart email marketer will act early before the calendars and inboxes are filled with all sorts of holiday stuff.

With more people buying stuff online more than ever and the open rates for mobile steadily increasing over time, email makes the best holiday marketing tool for retailers and users alike. During the holiday season, email marketing can help you drive online sales, boost year’s closing sales, give consumers an opportunity to narrow down gift choices or get last minute gifts. You can use themed templates and subject lines to customize your emails, grabbing the attention of your subscribers while showing off your products or services. Once you decide emailing is the way to go, you’ll need to remember that timing is the key element to the effectiveness of your targeted email campaigns.

A Special & Exclusive Way Of Communication: Holiday Emailing

Everyday is potentially a special day for someone or a celebration of something! In fact, there’s a saying in Turkish that goes “Deliye her gün bayram!” which roughly translates as “If you’re mad, you don’t need a reason to celebrate, everyday is a festival day to you, so celebrate away!”
OK, we’re not mad yet, but we can easily assume the same thing for the email marketer; since each and everyday and date is accounted for some special occasion; and any of these dates can give us a new and interesting hook, a chance to make ourselves heard by remembering the date with our next holiday emailing campaign! Let’s assume today’s the “Wake up late day!” (YAY!!!) so and the long sleepers will be happy to have their special day remembered, congratulated and celebrated. There are several ways for brands to connect with customers to drive sales during this busy time of year, but email marketing has consistently proven to be one of the most effective. And when you look at the popular holidays; like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mothers Day, Halloween, Black Friday, Easter, New Years, Mothers’ and Fathers’ days… etc. and other “special days” you know that they should occupy an important spot in the email marketers’ calendars.

Holy Ship!

As I was looking for some useful background information about holidays I’ve come to realize the origins of the word holiday; which then turned out to be HOLY DAY; and believe it or not, I’ve never thought about it this way before; it was always there right in front of me, sounding obvious too: HOLY DAY, but it never occured to me that there could be anything holy about the holidays.
The holiness of the holidays first originated from religious themes but later spread on to other special dates without the spiritual side and turned into raw marketing opportunities like black friday or cyber monday. For the non-believer a holiday or a special day is a chance to buy a gift for a loved one, get together, celebrate and mostly get lazy.

Apart from the spiritual content, the holidays are one of the busiest times for consume hungry customers while being the most profitable for the retailer, which will keep any business owner engaged for sometime, planning and succesfully executing a campaign. Keep in mind that customers are just as busy as the marketers during this time of year, and anything that can speed up their holiday shopping will benefit them, and the businesses alike.

Planning Ahead & Timing It Right…

Wherever you’re located, our first holiday email marketing tip is to collect a list of key holidays and integrate them into your email marketing calendar.

Here’s a good example of data visualization of holiday emailing campaigns by eMerge.

The standard behaviour for the consumer is that they wait until the last minute to buy the gifts for that specific holidays and one of the biggest reasons shoppers wait until the last minute is because they aren’t sure what to buy; enter a holiday emailing campaign to the rescue at the right time!

Here’s a good infographic -another data visualization example- on planning your holiday emailng campaigns.

If only sending a successful email marketing campaign were as simple as putting together a compelling offer, a great creative, an enticing subject line and sending your message. But it’s not! In the quest to get your users to open an email, the day and time that you send an email is also incredibly important. A large portion of your recipients are going to open your email the day that they receive it, not all of them will. As people visit their inboxes less frequently during the day and instead hit social network so you sould also be there to welcome them. Here’s a little list to assist you in plannig ahead:

Know Your Holidays
Plan early
Segment Your Lists
Create Holiday-Themed Campaigns
Create a Holiday Gift Guide
Launch Exclusive Holiday Sales
Theme Your Subject Lines
Optimize for Mobile
Pre-test Campaigns
Test and Measure
Adapt to results
Rinse & Repeat

A Great Example Of Special Date

Without giving the brand and agency name, have a look at this perfect example of using the date, special day theme and timing; this perfect example of themed email campaign stands before us:

An animated email template, the date Pi Day (get it, 3/14) March 14th, and an offer of $3.14 shipping on orders totalling $31.41 or more… According to the CD of the campaign, it regulated this perfect result: “The Pi(e) Day promotion was the highest revenue-generating promotion so far this holiday calendar, so far above that it made about 20% higher revenue than the second highest profitable campaign.”

Another great idea that works every time is, regardless of the time / date; adding a “free shipping” option to all your holiday orders which will make customers love you a lot!

Start Saving The Dates Early!

When it comes to holiday shopping, the consumer’s getting to action will take sometime and most of them will leave the gift purchasing to the last minute, so don’t wait for anything to get started on your holiday email marketing. Searching for the best dates and planning your holiday sales schedule; internet is the place to look for calendars of major, minor and offbeat dates, historical anniversaries, formal and official days, weeks, months and even years. But here is a brief schedule of the holiday season to help you get planning early:

Here’s a whole year holiday / special days schedule to keep track. Each of these dates provide you with a reason and an opportunity to reach out to your customers. Have a look at a standard working class’s year schedule and see what opportunities you might get to create beautiful emailing campaigns and exclusive offers:

Popular Holidays — 2017

Back to school period, September through October
Canadian Thanksgiving, October 9th
Halloween, October 31st
Veterans Day, November 11th
Black Friday, November 24th
Cyber Monday, November 27th
Giving Tuesday, November 28th
Thanksgiving, November 23rd
Small Business Saturday, November 25th
Free Shipping Day, December 15th
Hanukkah, December 12–20th
Christmas, December 25th
Boxing Day, December 26th
Green Monday, December 11th
Winter Solstice, December 21st
Christmas Eve, December 24th
Christmas Day, December 25th
Boxing Day, December 26th
Kwanzaa, December 26th -January 1st
New Year’s Eve, December 31st
New Year’s Day, January 1st
St. Valentines Day, February 14th
International Women’s Day, March 8th
Father’s Day, Third Sunday of June
Mother’s Day, Second Sunday of May
International Teachers Day, November 24th
…. many more. Remember that each and everyday is a reason & oportunity to celebrate something. If there’s will -to celebrate, there’s way -for holiday emailing!

If It Works, You Don’t Need To Fix It

One of the first things to do when getting ready for a holiday campaign is looking at what worked last year and what didn’t. The data shows that it’s worth it to increase email marketing during the holidays and that people are going to open emails even the number and freincreases drastically during the holidays because they will be looking for deals provided by email marketers and when looking at the past data, one has to consider various aspects, carefully read and interpret information to make it understandable and useful.

This useful data must contain; revenue from previous years, what made the most profit and what created the biggest loss, what your customers / subscribers responded positively in the past, what strategies worked while others didn’t, which email formats or themes received the greatest conversion, open and response rates, which emails attracted the most traffic. This data is going to help you fine-tune your future holiday emailing campaigns. BTW, the rising trend on data visualization may greatly help you interpreting facts and numbers by making them engaging and enjoyable. Here is a good example of data visualization on email deliverability by Lyris.

The Early Bird Catches The Worm!

Timing is… well not everything, but close! If companies, brands and startups are aiming to achieve great success in the long run, they’d already be scheduling for a early holiday, creating exclusive gift guides designed according to various user profiles, quality mobile experiences and developing solid segmentation strategies while implementing advanced personalization tactics in their email marketing campaigns. It’s common knowledge throughout the industry that people tend to open their email in the mornings. But as customers are becoming more and more mobile, email opens occur at all hours, on all devices. Holidays are when you need to trigger your sales the most. They are the reason of boosting sales mostly. Also looking at coming second-tier holidays and special days spread around the whole year might be a good idea since they are good opportunities to bring personality into your email campaigns for them to stand out in the overcrowded inboxes…

Considering the early planning and optimization targets, we’ve made a useful list any startup, brand, company, internet venture, e-commerce business, e-shop, e-store, e-mall or any retailer with a service or a product would want to go through before, during and after the holidays to maximize profits while conserving and growing a healthy audience. Here it goes, enjoy:

The 55 Holy Ways of the Holidays
Essential Tips & Tricks & Ideas & Notes for the Holiday Email Marketer

Optimize everything for mobile
Consider the latest trends
Make sure emails look good on any device
Make your campaigns cross-platform
Start acting early
Consider last year to improve results
Maintain a balance in sending frequency
Set short and long term goals
Use the element of surprise to your advantage
Reward your most loyal subscribers
Make your first impression count
Develop a holiday schedule / calendar
Keep your blog active, if you don’t have one, it’s a good time to start!
Keep your content fresh
Segment your subscribers to save time and money on marketing
Schedule your campaigns to send based on the time zone of your customers
A/B test holiday emails to make sure they’re driving clicks and sales
Connect your store to your email marketing platform
Communicate your goals to your crowd; be open and honest
Preview your emails to see the differences on 25 email clients
Ask an intriguing question in your subject line
Make an offer they can’t-resist! :D
Every shopper procrastinates, help last-minute shoppers with a deal
Narrow down gift ideas by creating specialized holiday gift guides
Include pictures, descriptions or deadlines in your emails
Use a mobile-friendly email templates
Use a web-friendly fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, or Georgia
Balance your emails’ image to text ratio carefully
Check in and monitor your deliverability results
Increase conversion and your ROI by tailoring your content to keep customers engaged
Use Kickbox to maintain a healthy contact list pre-holidays
Share a compelling holiday story your customers can relate to
Tell recipients exactly what’s in the email in subject line
Celebrate & congratulate something
Pick your promotions carefully, don’t flood people with offers
Carefully analyze the metrics and act on them
Track & measure your progress
Test your offers & improve accordingly
Test your subject lines & improve accordingly
Use themed & personalized emojis
Send the right email at the right time
Reward your subscribers for referring a friend
Hit the right subscribers with the right promotions
Always use an email automation platform like SENDLOOP to save pretious time, effort and money
Mostly avoid sending anything on mondays!
Make your data easily interpretable by data visualization tecniques
Invite your subscribers to holiday events
Create a fantastic subject line. We’ve been through this subject prety thoroughly before at this blog by giving the secrets of writing perfect subject lines to email marketers!
Use words of gratitude in your emails
Once you make plans and schedule actions, stick to them!
Promote one of your services
Give exclusive discounts
Create last minute offers
Theme your emails according to the holiday
Follow-up with emails after the holidays to stand out

Wrap Up

Even after the holiday period, email marketing plays a key role in lead generation and customer acquisition, so it makes sense to craft holiday email messages to capitalize on this peak sales period and boost your income.

With these holiday email marketing tricks, tips, ideas and data; you’re all set for a very merry — and profitable — holiday season. Seal the deal by creating the perfect CTA in your subject lines (see The Benign 99 of the Subject Line for tips) so your visitors want to join in, subscribe, upgrade, engage, shop, and spread the joy by sharing and referring.

When the holidays are over, it doesn’t mean you should stop sending emails. Remember what the crazy Turkish say: “Deliye her gün bayram!” “For the crazy ones, each and veryday is a festival to celebrate!” So consider sending a few “post-holiday” deals to your subscribers, and hit them when they least expect by choosing random special days and celebrate them with offers, giving them reasons to choose you so that you can make a few more sales and celebrate your and your customers’ holidays!

Happy emailing and happy holidays to all!

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