The vacation season represents a time of heightened anticipation—whether or not you’re a shopper or a marketer. For retailers, November and December account for about 19% of total annual sales. And the National Retail Federation estimates American companies will earn over $960 billion throughout the 2022 vacation push. In different phrases, the stakes are excessive.
There’s nonetheless time to formulate your email advertising and marketing marketing campaign plan and get your candy piece of the pie. With the fitting email advertising and marketing automation technique, you’ll be able to sit back by the hearth very quickly, sipping cocoa in fuzzy pajamas whereas the techniques you’ve put in place execute your campaigns to success.
Before we leap into this text, learn this piece first should you want a primer on what email automation is—and why you must use it.
3 advantages of email advertising and marketing automation
Writing and sending particular person emails in a series-long vacation advertising and marketing marketing campaign could be a tedious, time-consuming course of. However, one of the best email advertising and marketing campaigns are automated, as software program now exists to free you from the mundane execution-related duties.
Some of the vital enterprise targets automating vacation season emails may also help with embody boosting top-funnel consciousness, conserving assets, or setting a robust basis for fulfillment in 2024.
1. Boost model consciousness in a personalised method
Get your model title into shopper inboxes to remain prime of thoughts as buyers put together their lists.
Due to its cost-effectiveness and attain, email stays the primary customer acquisition strategy for retailers over the 2022 vacation season—employed by 89% of enormous firms and 96% of small firms. And whereas social and textual content advertising and marketing stay widespread, 70% of shoppers say email continues to be their preferred channel for communication.
2. Save money and time
With $36 returned for every dollar spent, email advertising and marketing supplies cost-effective promoting. What’s extra, research present email automation increases productivity by 20%—supplying you with much more bang to your buck. With email campaigns working within the background, you’ll have extra time to focus your consideration on inventive and strategic work.
3. Build repeat success
Automated or not, constructing an email advertising and marketing plan does require effort and time. The excellent news is that your email advertising and marketing automation technique is reusable. Save templates, course of automations, and deployment schedules to make use of subsequent Black Friday and Cyber Monday—or maybe sooner with Boxing Day, Valentine’s Day, and Presidents’ Day gross sales proper across the nook.
Gifts that hold giving: 10 automated vacation email examples
Your email advertising and marketing marketing campaign plan could embody a single sort of email or many. Here are 10 inspirational vacation email advertising and marketing concepts to make your vacation season merry and vivid.
1. Set up deserted cart triggered workflows
Many automated emails are behavior-triggered, which means a system tracks consumer searching, clicking, and shopping for actions throughout your web site and allows you to know when to ship advertising and marketing emails. For occasion, you may set your system to ship an deserted cart email as soon as a number of objects have been sitting within the cart for twenty-four hours.
Shoppers could abandon their carts for quite a few causes—higher choices elsewhere, a irritating checkout course of, a scarcity of cost choices, or expensive transport, as an illustration. So in your abandonment email, think about together with a coupon code or a free transport provide to beat objections.
Plus, the festive vacation season has many shoppers feeling beneficiant. It’s a perfect time to achieve out to contacts you haven’t engaged with shortly, as knowledge suggests buyer reactivation tends to extend beginning round Black Friday.
2. Clean up and section your contact lists
If you’re continually attempting to email invalid or inactive email addresses, mailbox suppliers could begin sending your correspondence on to spam folders. For this cause, cleansing your contact lists must be a precedence somewhat than an afterthought. Of course, guide cleansing will be tedious and time-consuming work.
Fortunately, you’ll be able to automate:
- Deliverability troubleshooting: With Twilio SendGrid’s deliverability insights, you’ll be able to automate the email listing cleansing course of and determine problematic addresses earlier than compromising deliverability.
- Customer segmentation: With SendGrid’s email listing administration, you’ll be able to import buyer knowledge to achieve full image visibility. Then, use these buyer insights to create strategic segments. For occasion, you may tag audiences into segments primarily based on demographics, geographic location, subjects of curiosity, or reward tier.
- Engagement monitoring: With SendGrid, you’ll be able to observe outcomes to yield one of the best email advertising and marketing campaigns, as you’ll know when to ship advertising and marketing emails and which messages are most probably to resonate.
3. Create a vacation email calendar and schedule your campaigns
By outlining vacation emails weeks, if not months, upfront, you’ll be able to arrange your groups and set the tone with shoppers for a season of promotions, bulletins, and communications.
When to ship advertising and marketing emails is a basic quandary. However, spacing out your messages ends in a well-choreographed marketing campaign you’ll be able to dazzle and maintain captivation.
For occasion, you may create an email advertising and marketing marketing campaign plan primarily based on massive gross sales days like Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Boxing Day. Or you may launch a “12 Days of Christmas” promotion sequence that runs day by day all through December.
Need assist planning? Let SendGrid’s email advertising and marketing calendar be your information. Once you resolve on a sending schedule, SendGrid supplies 3 methods to advance-schedule your emails, whether or not by way of Marketing Campaigns, the SMTP API header, or the API itself.
4. Automate a welcome sequence for brand spanking new subscribers
Personalized welcome emails boast an average 50% open rate, so think about this set off a greatest follow in email advertising and marketing automation technique. Beyond a thanks, your welcome email ought to, on the very least, present an attractive nugget of useful info and invite subscribers to browse.
Consider this straightforward welcome email from Harry’s, a shaving package model for males:
Or you may resolve to sweeten the email additional with useful ideas, how-to tutorials associated to a purchase order, customized content material suggestions primarily based on searching historical past, or a particular provide. Even an incentive as modest as free transport can encourage seasonal patrons to spend 30% more. Check out Chapter 2 for step-by-step directions on tips on how to implement welcome emails with SendGrid.
5. Establish a drip marketing campaign round your vacation reward information or e-book
Holidays provide distinctive alternatives to design and write inventive content material that buyers discover helpful. For occasion, an unique gated content material obtain is an easy automation set off the place leads enter their contact info to obtain entry to a vacation reward information. Did you understand reward guides yield 48% more transactions than a typical promotional email?
Check out this reward information from Carter’s, which breaks down widespread buys by class:
After giving shoppers a day or 2 to digest your reward information, you’ll be able to proceed your email advertising and marketing marketing campaign plan by sending buyer evaluations and testimonials, associated weblog posts, or a particular provide to solidify the sale. See Chapter 4 for step-by-step instructions on tips on how to arrange a customized automation primarily based on downloaded content material.
6. Send a thanks and share a deal
This time of yr, everyone seems to be on the lookout for a deal—and a deal will be the distinction between purchasing with you and purchasing with a competitor. It’s straightforward to get wrapped up within the vivid lights—focusing all of your efforts on shiny, new buyers—but take note, existing customers spend 67% more on average than new clients, making them value courting.
That means hold tabs in your most frequent clients and large spenders. Show your appreciation by automating a purchase-triggered email that makes reward members really feel like VIPs with unique, tier-based promotions and experiences.
Need assist designing your thanks message? Check out SendGrid’s free vacation thanks email template.
7. Boost engagement to your vacation occasion with a drip marketing campaign
Want to plan an in-person occasion this yr? Be positive to develop a enjoyable email advertising and marketing marketing campaign plan to construct consciousness and attendance. Your message ought to provide a preview of what buyers can browse and what offers they’ll discover. And today, most emails additionally provide on-line purchasing options to in-person occasions.
As you’ll be able to see with the instance above, email is a superb medium for breaking down advanced promotional tiers forward of time to assist buyers plan their methods and alleviate confusion at checkout time. See Chapter 3 for particulars on tips on how to arrange your occasion promotion email sequence.
8. Use vacation email templates with built-in personalization
Take benefit of email advertising and marketing templates to automate the design course of. And inside a couple of minutes, you’ll be able to have the right vacation email able to go, whether or not you’d like to advertise reward concepts or provide last-minute reductions.
SendGrid’s email editor permits you to construct with drag-and-drop instruments, code, or a hybrid. Plus, there are many responsive vacation email templates to select from, regardless of your model desire.
9. Collect analytics knowledge to determine top-performing emails
The email advertising and marketing marketing campaign plan is simply a part of automation’s full vary of worth. Automation is about far more than merely scheduling and sending advertising and marketing messages. In truth, a few of the Most worthy automation work occurs behind the scenes as shoppers open, click on, and browse your vacation advertising and marketing emails. The greatest email advertising and marketing campaigns are decided by knowledge.
With SendGrid’s email statistics, you’ll seize useful viewers insights, hold tabs on deliverability, and perceive how emails carry out. Not to say built-in testing permits you to check completely different email topic traces, provides, and call-to-action buttons, making success repeatable.
10. Follow up after the vacations to encourage connection
It’s straightforward to consider December 25 because the grand finale of the vacation season—but Google discovered 20% of online store traffic in December occurs within the 6 days after Christmas. But earlier than respiration a giant sigh of reduction, think about how one can hold the momentum of the height purchasing season going.
“Buy yourself the gift you didn’t get” promotions will be very profitable, particularly when paired with a particular provide that encourages buyers to deal with themselves or buy for the brand new yr.
See how slippers model mahabis retains the social gathering going:
Automate your emails to spice up vacation gross sales with Twilio SendGrid
From design to deliverability, Twilio SendGrid has all of the email advertising and marketing automation technique ideas and instruments you’ll want to efficiently navigate the vacation push. Spend a couple of minutes organising and let our infrastructure deal with your campaigns.
For extra email advertising and marketing marketing campaign plan suggestions:
With the vacations already underway, there’s no time like the current to get began. SendGrid’s Marketing Campaigns Free Plan permits you to create a sign-up type, ship single emails, A/B check, and automate as much as 6,000 messages per thirty days—freed from cost. That’s proper, scaling your email advertising and marketing automation technique is reasonably priced and simple. Contact our Sales staff for particulars.