4 tips for creating effective holiday emails

It’s not even Halloween and here we are talking about Christmas! As a marketer, you always need to stay at least one or two steps ahead of seasonality and with Google research showing that 38% of Christmas shopping is done before we even reach Back Friday, it’s never too early to ensure you’re taking all possible steps to maximise your sales this holiday season.With its consistently strong ROI, email marketing should be a key pillar of your ecommerce website’s marketing strategy and certainly something to recommend to your clients if you take up our web development agency Business-In-A-Box opportunity.So, what goes into crafting an effective holiday email?

1. Research As with almost every form of marketing, data is your foundation for crafting a highly effective optimised holiday email. For this, you’ll need to go back to previous years and look at what worked and what didn’t. Are there certain subject lines that triggered notably higher open rates for example? At what time of day and day of the week did your best performing email get sent? What codes or incentives did you offer and which ones performed best?All of this data gives you insightful pointers for where you should be starting your email campaigns this year. Bring it all together so you have the raw ingredients for success to hand. 2. Test A/B testing is incredibly helpful as it allows you to trial your ideas and test important components of your email on a small sample of your email list. You can use it to test two or three different subject lines you have shortlisted, monitor which one performs best and use that for your main send. You can also use it to test content and images – each time allowing you to refine your options down to create the best possible version of your email. 3. Create compelling promos Email recipients will expect you to offer them something special during the holiday season to win their custom so you need to get your ducks in a row when it comes to promos and incentives.As we saw earlier, the holiday shopping window is fairly large so you’ll need a range of promotions, discounts and offers to see you through this period. If you can research what competitors are doing (by signing up to their mailing lists and scrutinising their websites and social media), you may get some additional ideas as to how you can out-promo them.If you have a loyalty club, rewards program or similar, consider also how you can offer additional rewards to those valued customers. 4. Create seasonal creative If you haven’t already sorted out your creative, set some time aside now to do exactly that. This doesn’t just mean downloading a few seasonal stock images to drop into your email template. You should also think about creating a synergy and consistency for subscribers clicking on your offers by adding festive imagery to your shopping cart, check out and thank you pages along with product and landing pages.Getting organised up front and having a clear plan of action means you will have time to craft the most effective email possible and won’t miss key opportunities to connect with your customers as they research and buy presents this year.