As the holidays approach email marketing teams are busy determining promotional schedules, designing messages, and inputting coupon codes into their e-commerce platforms among a slew of other items. With all of this work happening behind the scenes, there are a few holiday items that all-too-commonly fall by the wayside. When preparing your email marketing program for the season, don’t overlook some of the items that can help you deliver a better customer experience and generate more sales. Here are five items to not overlook this holiday season.
1. Optimize transactional messages
Messages like order and shipping confirmation messages are some of the most read email messages. At a minimum, be sure these messages are branded, aesthetically appealing, and has clear and obvious customer service information. To make these messages do more for you, include other elements, such as product recommendations, suggested upsells or cross-sells, sister brand promotions, a customer-only promotion, and a callout to subscribe to your email marketing program. Remember, all customers receive these messages, not just email subscribers.
2. Audit lifecycle messages
Consider your current lifecycle messages, their automation rules, and how they impact the customer experience during the holidays. For instance, let’s say your welcome series spans four days and withholds new subscribers from receiving promotional emails. Do you really want to withhold new subscribers from marketing emails on Black Friday or Cyber Monday?
You may want to make adjustments to the series, which could include:
Sending only the welcome message and suspending the series.
Create a new welcome series that reinforces holiday content, such as gift guides, hot products of the season, extended return policies, BOPIS services, or other value-adds.
Continue to send the welcome series but allow subscribers to receive promotional messages.
This is just one example. Look at your other automated messages. Do you have a purchase anniversary message sending each year on Black Friday, offering a worse incentive than your Black Friday promotion? I receive one of these each year and it provides no value to me as a subscriber. Do you need to adjust the timing, number of, or discounts with your abandoned cart messages? Remember, automated messages should never be considered “set it and forget it.”
3. Audit forms
You are going to receive increased traffic during the holidays so be sure to audit each of your forms to ensure they work properly. These include embedded email subscription forms, popup signups, manage preference pages, and unsubscribe forms.
To audit the forms, go through the process of accessing the form like a web visitor, email subscriber or customer would. Do they display (and not display) as they should, do they close properly, are the landing pages correct, and do the desired actions (e.g. list assignment) function appropriately? You want to ensure the forms are not only functioning properly, but they are assigning contacts to the correct lists.
When you are auditing your forms, don’t forget to test on mobile devices. Last year, for the first time, more than half of all retailer web traffic during the holidays was from smartphones. Ensure you test the forms not only on a laptop but also on smartphones.
Be sure to document where each of these forms live on the backend, which employees have access to them, and how customers access the forms. This will give you the ability to quickly identify and resolve any issues that might arise during the season.
4. Preach your differentiators
During the holiday season, why should someone choose to shop with you and not someone else — especially seeing as many retailers are matching deep discounts with one another? You need to give consumers a reason to choose you by preaching your competitive differentiators. Some of these customer-first differentiators include free shipping, free returns, extended return policies, price matching, satisfaction guarantees, and buy online pick-up in-store (BOPIS).
Prominently advertise these value-adds with banners or dedicated sections of your email, on your website and your social pages. And when it comes to email, prominently showcase these in high-consideration messages, such as welcome, abandoned cart, and browse recovery messaging.
By focusing on what the customer wants and how you, as a brand, can deliver that can mean the difference between securing a holiday sale or losing it to your competitor.
5. Plan for the unexpected
Things rarely go as planned, and good email marketers prepare for those times. When it comes to the holiday season, there are a few specific ways to prepare for those “what if” moments, whether that be a slow website, lagging sales, or errant promo code.
Prepare back-up promotions: Projections are just that, projections. If you find your sales through the season are lagging, sending another promotion can help jump-start those orders coming in. Create emails that utilize alternate incentives (such as tiered discounts, or free shipping with no minimums) or tried-and-true discounts that you know will resonate with your customers. By preparing these promotions in advance you will prevent those last-minute scrambles, and rush errors, from your creative team.
Promo codes: Set any promo code you plan on using in your e-commerce platform before you need them. While you may not need to use some of the alternate or extra promotional codes, it provides the ability to easily deploy email campaigns as needed.
“Oops” message: Websites and e-commerce platforms have become more reliable, there is still one of those “oops” moments each year. Some of these include a slow or crashed website, wrong promo code, and order processing errors. Creating an anticipatory email ahead of those moments will allow you to send a correction email as soon as possible. When errors like this occur, every second can cost you a sale.
Planning for the holidays means more than just creating a few emails and sending them off to your subscribers. It is ensuring all aspects of your program is optimized, and you are prepared for every scenario. Making sure every “I” is dotted, and every “t” is crossed means you are doing everything you can to maximize your holiday sales.