5 Ways to Win Your Holiday Email Campaigns This Season

With Black Friday just around the corner—it’s time to get your holiday email campaigns in order. Here are five ways to win the holiday season:  

Tip 1: Beat quantity with quality 

Brands send 13% more emails in Q4 than Q3, so standing out against sheer volume will likely be your biggest challenge of the season. Our favorite way to compete against quantity? Focus on creating quality segmented promotions. Eighty percent of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that provide personalized experiences, so organizing your strategy by demographics and behavior is crucial. For the holiday season, look at:  

• Who your gift-givers were last year. Have customers who only stop by your brand during the holidays? Remind them that you’re there! Focus on curated gift guides to make the experience that much easier this time around. 
• Your most loyal fans. Remind your VIP and loyalty program members that they are getting exclusive (or early) access to your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Boxing Day sales.  
• Your category shoppers. Are your customers buying the same kind of thing over and over? Entice them with specialized promo codes (for example, if they’re a cat owner, you could send a code  MEOW20 for 20 percent off cat-related products).   

No matter how you choose to segment—developing a targeted strategy for each customer persona is key to standing out against the flurry of holiday promotions. 

Tip 2: Speaking of quantity...here’s how many emails you should actually be sending 

The only thing better than quality emails are quality emails sent at the right time and cadence. This time of year, it will all depend on the length of promotion offered during early access, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other seasonal promos.  

For Early Access VIP sales, we recommend a total promotion time of 48 hours, and this could include sending an email every 12 hours plus one in the last couple of hours of the sale (4 emails total). Here’s what that looks like: 

• Email 1 - Announcing sale at 8am  
• Email 2 - 12 hours later at 8pm  
• Email 3 - 24ish hours later (today is the last day messaging) at 10am  
• Email 4 - final send at 11pm or a couple of hours earlier (1 hour left messaging) 

Keep in mind—subject lines, preview text and imagery for all four of these emails should be different! 

For Black Friday-Cyber Monday (November 25 – November 28), this is a good opportunity to A/B test imagery and copy within emails to see what resonates with your audience. Here’s a rough guide for what this sending schedule could look like: 

• Email 1 - Announce Black Friday sale (November 21) 
• Email 2 - (November 23) 
• Email 3 - (November 25 morning) Incorporate a sense of urgency to encourage people to shop by offering a gift with purchase or using language like “while supplies last”  
• Email 4 - (November 25, afternoon) 
• Email 5- (November 25, evening) 
• Email 6 - (November 26, last day of Black Friday sale) 
• Email 7 - Announce extending the sale (November 27) 
• Email 8 - (November 28, morning) 
• Email 9 - (November 28, evening) - this one could be an optional final push 

Keep in mind: You can provide an optimized experience for your consumers by personalizing the content and creative of emails around your consumers buying preferences. And don’t forget to suppress recent purchasers—you don’t want to be an annoyance in their inbox. 

Tip 3: Try a holiday gift guide 

As we mentioned above, a gift guide can be an excellent way to drive shoppers to your site and increase their average order value. There are plenty of ways to set up a gift guide, but here are some of our favorites: 

• Gift guide by price point: Allow customers to browse and shop within their budgets. Creating guides starting at different price points helps shoppers get to their desired ranges for gifts quicker, increasing their likelihood of converting. 
• Gift guide based on previous purchase history: Customer data is valuable and access to their purchase history is a great tool to utilize. Offering a gift guide with compatible items that complement their previous purchases could pique their interest and maximize their following purchases. 
• Gift guide based on site activity history: Personalization catches a customer’s attention. Making their previously viewed items/most interacted with categories into a guide makes it feel customized; plus, it’s easy access for customers to revisit those items.  
• Gift guide based on an occasion or theme: Sometimes customers know what event they’re shopping for but need ideas on what to buy. Curating a guide that offers all the products needed to make that event extra special makes this search much easier. It offers customers a one-stop shop for necessary purchases they’re looking for and sometimes, inspires them to throw in extra little “wants” or items they didn’t know they needed. 

Tip 4: Don’t forget about last-minute shoppers 

According to a survey from Klarna, 79% of shoppers procrastinate and leave their shopping until the last minute. For these types of emails, it would be helpful to also include recommended order deadlines to ensure delivery before the end of the year.  

If your company has a policy in place to offer a deal if a full cart lingers past a certain amount of time, try incorporating that as a follow-up in your holiday campaigns. Framing an email around last-minute savings in honor of the holidays makes the customer’s need to purchase a little more urgent because once the holiday is gone, so is the deal your company is extending. 

Tip 5: Plan a post-holiday campaign 

Your campaign does not (and should not) end when the holidays do! A post-holiday campaign is a terrific opportunity to encourage those that were gifted money or gift cards to make a purchase. This could include developing a post-holiday guide or exclusive New Year’s offer.  

Offers and guides encourage loyal, recurring customers to check out the latest products and give new customers a chance to explore your inventory with some direction. Keeping both audiences in mind makes planning a post-holiday lead nurture strategy much easier to execute. 

Contact Investis Digital 

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