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A successful holiday campaign requires close attention to detail, including strategizing your marketing approach to running your campaign across platforms. Whether you've already started or are just thinking about it, here are some steps to consider to maximize visibility and engagement during the upcoming rush.
prepare
Proper planning in advance can help prevent performance degradation, right? If you haven't already done so, make sure you complete these first steps first.
- connect: Contact all mission-critical technology stack partners to ensure all invoices are paid during the holiday period and to communicate expected usage, frequency, and usage spikes to ensure support is available when needed. Masu.
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sort out: Clean up your subscriber list to improve delivery rates and ensure your messages are seen by the right customers. Even the most well-thought-out email marketing campaign can be disrupted by deliverability issues. Therefore, be sure to suppress contacts with low engagement or low quality contact scores.
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To interact: Give your customers a reason to engage with your brand and a clear value exchange to provide first-party and zero-party data and to opt-in to marketing campaigns like surveys, polls, quizzes, contests, and social stories. Incorporate a reward system.
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Re-engage: It is much cheaper to retain or re-engage existing customers than to acquire new ones. So try to win back disengaged customers by offering personalized questions, deals, and offers.
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review: Look at your performance from last year's holiday season, analyze what went well and what didn't, and identify areas of strength and areas for improvement.
Related: It's time to target holiday shoppers. Elevate your email marketing efforts now to maximize profits this season.
plan
Campaigns that go beyond sending a single message to an entire database require planning that takes into account the fact that your customers are constantly evolving. Learning about them and maintaining relationships with them is a core function of a successful relationship marketing campaign.
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data: Identify the critical data your campaigns need, such as inventory levels, offer countdowns, and expiration dates, and ensure your tech stack integrates with that information and updates in real-time.
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profile: Use the zero-party data you collect to create progressive profiles that take into account your customers' interests, preferences, motivations, and desires.
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discount: Customers expect holiday discounts, so be sure to offer them. Do this strategically, saving big discounts for less engaged customers and not giving excessive discounts to loyal customers who don't need big savings on their purchases. Early/exclusive access, prizes, loyalty benefits, and content are all valid drivers of value exchange.
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warm up: Before you increase your email volume, ask your ISP to prepare you for smaller batches to accommodate your increased email volume. ISPs expect consistency, so a sudden spike in email activity can result in a spam label.
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Optimize: Make sure your website is ready to handle incoming traffic. That also applies to mobile. Test and optimize your email templates and subject lines to increase engagement and open rates.
Execute
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are typically the biggest email and SMS volume events of the year, resulting in a spike in transactions, but only if done right. Put your hard-earned first- and zero-party data to good use.
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schedule: Decide on the best time to send your campaigns and remember that a quarter of consumers report being frustrated when brands send communications at the wrong time.
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Personalization: Don’t just put your name in the subject line, use the zero-party data you collect to offer your customers the products they’re interested in, within their declared budget, and use keywords you know will elicit a response. To do.
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cell phone: It's a mobile world, so leverage both in-app messaging and text/SMS as separate channels, rather than simply mirroring the same content as email. This includes time-limited reminders and segmented discounts.
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engage: Increase engagement with promotions that encourage early holiday shopping, exclusive offers, and discounts. Ensure your customers are supported with enhanced customer support.
Related: 6 things to consider to put together the best holiday marketing plan ever
Assess and respond
It's not over yet. As the year draws to a close, there are a number of things you should do to ensure that the customers you acquired/served over the holidays remain loyal and satisfied into the new year and make the most of last-minute shoppers. There are still many things to do.
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Assist: Make sure your customers know the last sale and shipping date, and be prepared to support them with additional purchasing and shipping options.
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analysis: Evaluate, replicate, and enhance the tactics that worked during Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and use the same methods to make the most of your late shopping efforts.
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Inspire: Encourage customers to make last-minute purchases by offering exciting offers and a sense of urgency, such as countdown sales.
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appreciate: Don't forget to thank your customers for choosing to shop with you. Emails that include a thank you note in the subject line have higher open and click-through rates than industry benchmarks.
The holiday promotional season seems to start earlier and earlier each year. But it's never too early to start thinking about and developing marketing strategies, techniques, and technology that drive revenue and customer engagement during the busiest shopping period of the year.
