With the Christmas season right around the corner, make sure your email strategies are in tip-top shape to maximize engagement, and drive revenue. The Christmas season is one of the busiest sales periods of the year, with last year’s US spending hitting the trillion-dollar mark. Last year, more than 60% of shoppers wanted to do their holiday shopping from the comfort of their own homes, and this will likely increase because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With email being one of the biggest drivers of ROI (for every $1 spent, you get a $38 return) make sure you’re ready to leverage the power of email with the right strategies to engage customers better during their buying journey, drive retention post-Christmas, and meet your sales goals this holiday season. Let’s dive in!
1. Leveraging the Power of Data, and Segmenting your Audience by Engagement
Figuring out who you’re sending your emails to is one of the most important steps in your email strategy. Make sure you’re collecting the right data from the start of your customers’ buying journey so you can tailor their experience based on their needs and preferences. Use your customers ’previous spending behavior and those that are in the same segment to infer their future purchases and drive your campaign.
Use signup forms
This is a foolproof way to ask the right questions from the get-go! You can ask customers questions about their preferences, what products they’re interested in, and how often they want to hear from you.
Create a contest
Step in for Santa by giving one of your lucky followers a chance to win some cool prizes! Not only are you gaining subscribers when you ask entrants to enter emails, but you can later email them with aggressive discounts as an incentive to make a purchase.
Segment your audience by engagement
When you segment your audience by past engagement behavior, you’re sending emails based on when and how subscribers will most likely engage. You can tailor their brand experience unique to their relationship with your brand, and build strong customer relationships that improve retention. By segmenting your audience by engagement, you know exactly who’s most likely to open your emails and who isn’t.
Segmenting by engagement also helps improve your deliverability so you can have confidence that you’re always landing in your customers’ inbox. Your subscriber engagement is one of the main factors that ISPs take into consideration when scoring your sender reputation. By segmenting your list and sending based on engagement level, you’re essentially sending emails you know are likely to be opened, which effectively improves deliverability across all your recipients.
Read more: The Key to Maximizing Opens and Clicks: Segmenting By Engagement Level
2. Automate, Automate, Automate!
There’s no question that email automations directly increase open rates, and conversions, meaning more money in your pocket. Make sure you have these automations set up before Christmas!
Welcome automation
Over 74% of customers expect to see a welcome automation in their inbox once they’ve signed up for your list. At this point in the customer journey, your customer just expressed interest in hearing from you, and they’re most likely going to open and click any email you send. With a 50 to 60% open rate, they get some of the highest engagement of any marketing email.
New customer thank you
New customer thank you automations are a great way to go one step above and beyond to engage customers and differentiate your brand experience apart from the competition. You can build brand loyalty by showing some appreciation for customers that just made their first purchase for the Christmas holidays. Automate your emails, and send them some extra love for their support - this could be in the form of free shipping on their next purchase, or a coupon code!
Abandoned cart automations
Set up a simple abandoned cart automation and don’t lose out on any potential revenue this Christmas! About 70% of customers that start a cart don’t end up checking out, that’s a lot of potential revenue lost! Abandoned cart emails average a 10% conversion rate, meaning more engagement and more money for your brand!
Browse abandonment automations
Go one step further, and set up your browse abandonment automations which are hyper-targeted based on customer browsing behavior! 39% of customers browse products without making a purchase! Browse abandonment emails have an even higher conversion rate (12%) than simple abandoned cart emails, meaning for every 1200 customers leaving your online store, you could be making 144 more sales - money that would otherwise be left on the table.
Using conditional splits in automations
Using conditional splits with your automations leads to better targeting, better engagement, improved deliverability, and even more revenue! Set up conditional splits for your abandoned cart automations based on your customers’ cart value and send emails geared towards high-value carts and low-value carts. Offering discount codes for higher value carts is a surefire way to grab your customers’ attention, and increase conversion. Offering a % off certain cart size for lower value carts will help you bump up your average order value and get customers to complete their purchases.
3. Design Emails To Maximize Engagement
Now that you know who you’re sending to, and you have the right automations set up, let’s talk about what you should be sending! There are a few email design best practices that you should follow if you want to send good emails that drive engagement and conversions.
Personalize your emails!
You can never go wrong with personalizing your emails as much as possible! Build your relationship with your customers by merging in first names, remembering birthdays, or recommending products based on their preferences. The goal is to make your customer feel like they have a relationship with your brand and that you care about their needs.
Clear CTA
No one likes reading long emails or having to search to find the purpose of the email. Instead, add clear CTA’s that are above the email fold because this translates to higher conversions!
Social icons
Your customers want to stay connected to your brand! Make sure you include social icons so customers can follow you and get Christmas inspo from your social media. Remember, it’s all a part of their brand experience.
Quality over quantity
Always send emails that are concise and tailored to your customers’ needs! Longer emails are often clipped (especially in Gmail) and can be viewed as spam by ISPs.
Wrap Up
The Christmas shopping season is one of the busiest and most exciting periods of the year for both ecommerce brands, and their customers! With the current COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll be seeing even more customers doing their holiday shopping online, meaning your email strategy’s more important than ever. Remember, it’s all about bringing that brand experience through your email sends. By leveraging your data, properly segmenting your audience, setting up the right automations, and building well-designed emails, you’ll engage customers and drive conversions this Christmas season!
