47 Ways to Prepare Your Email Marketing and Ecommerce Store For The 2020 Holiday Season

The holiday shopping season is fast approaching there is a lot of uncertainty about what will unfold. Questions surrounding the health of the economy and what a resurgence of COVID-19 might have on the supply chain make planning for this holiday season unique. 

One thing I do expect from this season is for ecommerce to further increase its already-increased share of retail sales. We saw email become a go-to channel for consumers during the COVID pandemic with a nearly 23% lift in conversion rates, and I expect this to carry over into the holidays. If you are an email marketer, here are 47 ways you can prepare your marketing program and ecommerce store for the holiday shopping season.   

General:

  1. Start marketing early — e.g., late October
  2. Pay attention to the Cyber 10
  3. Pay close attention to the feel of the nation (COVID, economy) and adjust your marketing copy accordingly
  4. Don’t wait until Black Friday to start marketing—again, start early

Technical Prep:

  1. Collect SMS numbers along with email addresses—grow your trusted marketing channels
  2. Audit website forms (e.g., sign-up, exit-intent)—how to edit them and who has access to do so
  3. Test sign-up forms and ensure they work properly

Email Design:

  1. Use emojis in subject lines
  2. Use emojis in the preheader text
  3. Make your emails mobile-friendly
  4. Include a “top gifts” or similar section in your nav bar
  5. Create a custom, holiday-themed header
  6. Keep the CTA obvious in emails (let people digest the message quickly)
  7. Make sale exclusions obvious—avoid misleading people and frustrating them at checkout
  8. Acknowledge that self-gifting is real and design your messaging to account for it

Promotional Marketing Messages:

  1. Promote value-adds/differentiators in your emails (e.g., extended return policies, always free shipping)
  2. Use remails—but not every time (think about when it makes sense)
  3. Send multiple emails on peak days (Thanksgiving Day, Back Friday, Cyber Monday)
  4. Utilize SMS marketing, both as a stand-alone channel and to complement email
  5. Utilize a sense of urgency (subject lines, CTA, copywriting)
  6. Use product recommendations in your emails (for self-gifting, of course)

Automated Email Marketing Messages:

  1. Adjust workflow timing (are you suppressing new signups from Black Friday emails?)
    Welcome series
    Cart abandonment
    Lapsed-purchaser
    Product review emails
  2. Create seasonal automated messages (e.g., holiday-specific welcome series)
  3. Optimize your transactional messages for sales (shipping and order confirmation)
  4. Adjust abandoned cart timing rules
  5. Increase the number of abandoned cart messages
  6. Adjust the discounting strategy in your cart abandonment messages (is the discount worse than your holiday everyday promotion?)
  7. Use browse/product abandonment messages—please, use them!
  8. Integrate SMS messages into your email automation workflows, especially cart abandonment
  1. Monitor your ROAS
  2. Retarget email contacts on social and paid search
  3. Test different/new social channels and search engines (e.g., Bing, Pinterest, YouTube)
  4. Use influencers

Customer Service:

  1. Implement live chat on your website
  2. Extend your return policies
  3. Solidify your BOPIS strategy/expand BOPIS offerings
  4. Collect info for gift-reminder messaging

Discounts/Benefits:

  1. Test different incentives (% off, & off, tiered discounts, deals of the day, X days of deals, flash sales, free shipping, free express shipping, VIP-only, SMS-only, email-only, for BOPIS-only orders, etc.)
  2. Understand that free shipping has increasingly being used as THE incentive as the season winds down. Test it and save yourself some margin.
  3. Make a holiday playlist on Spotify (for both your customers and employees)
  4. Offer free gift wrapping

Prepare for the Unexpected:

  1. Prepare an “oops” email in advance
  2. Have backup promotions and coupon codes already created and loaded in your ecomm platform
  3. Identify potential shipping challenges and have a contingency plan in place
  4. Identify possible supply chain chokepoints and prepare for the “what if”
  5. Prepare for a pandemic resurgence — and what that measns for your business

Finally:

  1. Have fun and enjoy the season!

If you have any specific questions around the holiday season, please feel free to contact me!


And, of course, some of these tips from 2019 may still be useful, so check out this post, “Top Holiday Email Marketing Planning Resources”