Three tips for email marketing around Christmas

The end of the year is approaching which means Christmas is around the corner, one of the jolliest times of the year. Consumers massively walk through the beautifully decorated shopping streets in search for the perfect Christmas gifts and catchiest Christmas decorations. The holiday month is therefore one of the most important times of the year for retailers. A lot of purchases are made, not only in physical stores, but also online. Last year, the three weeks up to Christmas Eve generated a 34% increase in the average weekly turnover for online retail, according to a study by Thuiswinkel.org and PostNL.

The effective use of email campaigns allows online retailers to increase their conversion rates even more around this time. A catchy Christmas campaign ensures that you can bring personalized offers to your audience and encourages them to make a purchase. Unfortunately, a lot of marketeers already know this and act out on this. Exactly because so many emails are sent during the December month, it is necessary to go an extra mile in order to get your emails delivered and get through the clutter. Here we share three tips that can help you with that.

1. Segment your list and send relevant content

Segmenting your email list is one of the most important factors that can influence the Return On Investment of your email campaigns. Generally speaking, segmented email campaigns achieve better results than campaigns that you send to your entire list. Use the data that you collected from your subscribers and group them into different lists based on their past purchases, demographics, viewed products, interests etc.

When you group your segments in the right way, you can send them relevant emails with content and offers that ensure maximum engagement.

2. Add some urgency

There is something about urgency that makes people take action. The psychological principle behind this is also known as “The Mere Urgency Effect” i.e. a tendency to pursue urgency over importance. There are a few reasons that explain why this works so well. In urgent situations, the body releases chemicals that put our brain on alert, prepare our reflexes and enable us to act quickly. On a more conscious level, people perceive more value in something that is limited or something that is scarce. Many of the problems that negatively influence conversion rates are caused by things like; people thinking too long or too hard about a decision (i.e. clicking on a link). Adding a sense of urgency takes these aspects away.

As an email marketer you can use urgency to your advantage. A few examples of how you can do this are:

Highlighting the scarcity of a product with phrases such as “Only 3 left in stock” or “While supplies last”. This communicates to the reader that if they wait too long with their purchase, there is a reasonable chance that the product will not be available anymore. This strategy works especially well with abandoned shopping cart campaigns.

Adding a limited time frame to offers. When you have a Christmas sale you can accentuate the duration of this sale with phrases such as “Offer ends in 2 days” or “Quick! Only 3 hours left”. You can also add a live timer which shows how many days/hours/minutes are left before the sale ends. People who are considering to purchase something during the sale, might get that extra push to take action immediately, because they would hate to miss out on a good offer.

You can also use the Christmas Holidays itself as an excuse to create urgency. Because of our busy lives, a lot of people often do their Christmas shopping last minute. With phrases like “Special Christmas edition” or “Only during Christmas” you can play into this.

3. Mind the design of your email templates

Aside from segmenting your email list, sending relevant content and creating a sense of urgency, the design and format of your email templates also affects the results of your email campaigns. Sending promotional emails with a lot of images used to be pretty popular. However, you can now see that a shift is somewhat happening and emails that contain flat text are becoming increasingly popular.

The use of images in your emails is attractive, but too many of them can “scare” some email users. A reason for this is that they see these emails as spam, because they are already bombarded with ads that are screaming for attention. This is ofcourse the last thing you want to achieve. Make sure to have a good balance of images and text.

Either way, always make sure that your emails are correctly configured - even when you send emails with a lot of images. Do not forget to add an ALT description to all your images and make sure that you always have a text version for your html templates. In addition, make sure that your emails look good on different devices. This is especially important for mobile since many emails are opened on this device.

Throughout the year it can be a challenge to land in the inbox of your subscribers and be opened. Because of the large amount of emails that are sent around the holidays, it can be slightly more difficult during this period. If you keep these three tips in the back of your mind, you can increase the likelihood that your emails will end up in the inbox and result in conversion.