8 Holiday Email Marketing Tips To Cheer Up 2022 Sales

Looking to engage and re-engage customers this holiday season?

Holiday email marketing tips are what you need! Of course, there are other factors too. But, today we will cover a very crucial aspect of B2B holidays.

Notwithstanding the nature or business type, the holiday marketing tips we discuss below are good for B2C, small businesses, and C2c too. Let’s clear one basic thing first!

Skip to holiday email marketing tips

Why Take Holiday Email Marketing Seriously?

Brands and small businesses use seasonal email campaigns every time. And, holiday marketing email campaigns are the most awaited ones. Seasonal email marketing is not just about promoting your Christmas or BFCM sales! Simply put they bring in more revenue, traffic, and engagement.

Stating the facts purely,

• US holiday sales in 2021 were more than $123 billion. Besides, Adobe forecasts 2022 online sales to hit a whopping $910 billion.
• The NPD Group surveyed 29% of holiday shoppers planning to spend more than last year.

So, unless you want to lose part of the expected revenue, you can skip the holiday email marketing tips.

All you need is to bring your prospects and customers to your store. And, what better than a holiday email pitch with a perfect subject line? Thereafter, let your store do the talking.

Why Are Email Marketing Campaigns More Effective During Holidays?

A simple reason to believe why email marketing campaigns work undoubtedly is that 99% of email users check their inbox daily with the exception of some checking it 20 times a day! Above all, 84.3% of users check their emails once a day positively. (Pathwire, 2021)

Moreover, the holiday email blast encourages:

• Mobile shopping, since 41% of people open their emails on mobile devices.
• High conversion rates with instant purchasing options.
• Attracts more traffic to your website.
• Brand awareness.

In HubSpot, B2B marketers have also admitted that new item or product feature announcement emails have the highest click-through rates. So, it is safe to say that email open rates can promote holiday sales.

Above all, before you plan and execute your holiday marketing, keep these 8 email tips in mind.

1. Leverage Marketing Automation for Successful Holiday Season Emails

The most efficient strategy to increase email open rates is to reach the target audience at the appropriate time with the appropriate message. And what’s this? Your secret weapon for a successful holiday email marketing campaign is marketing automation.

If you have never used email marketing automation, then you’re losing out on everything. Do your business a favor, and consider these stats:

• 51% of marketers currently use marketing automation.
• Triggered emails sent via automations have 8 times more open rates than typical bulk emails.

You can effectively use marketing automation for creating holiday email workflows. Some automated campaigns you can take inspiration from are:

– Firstly, send automated abandoned cart recovery emails. Every time a consumer starts the checkout process but doesn’t complete it to make a purchase, you should send an abandoned cart email.

However, don’t just stop here. Make sure you self-analyze your checkout experience and find the major reason for cart abandonment too.

– Secondly, use welcome emails for new customers. They have a great impact on customer lifetime value. Accompany your welcome email with special one-time offers, discount coupons, limited-time deals, etc to coax them to return to your eCommerce store.

– Finally, promotional emails are also seasonal emails with offers, promotional sales, updated shipping information, gift cards offer, contact details, gift wrapping services & ideas, membership updates, etc. Moreover, you can test all your B2B holiday email ideas.

Hence, plan your email marketing automation campaigns by making a list of your objectives this holiday season. Subsequently, determine your prospects and customers for the best results.

2. Personalize Your Holiday Emails

Every organization keeps three things on priority regarding email marketing campaigns: personalization, automation, and segmentation.

Your eCommerce business’ holiday email marketing strategy becomes generalized if you don’t embrace the power of personalization. It is because personalization can

• Highly increase your engagement.
• Stand out in users’ inboxes since it has tailor-made requests.
• Improve customer experience.

Instead of just being a means of promoting sales and discounts, a strong email marketing campaign communicates what a company is and isn’t.

Personalized emails bring you one step closer to your customers. It is one of the most important holiday email marketing tips for you!

Use Enticing Subject Line

Email subject lines are important since they are the first thing a subscriber sees in an email. In addition to the subject lines, the CTA button is important.

Using catchy headings may persuade the customer to click that button. For example, “ All Treats, No Tricks”.

While 47% of people open emails based on their subject lines, 69% directly report the mail as spam based on the same.

A compelling subject line removes any doubt about not opening the email. Instead, you get the open rate right there. A proven strategy for better subject lines is the use of power words.

You can also increase the open rate by including emojis in your subject line, like pumpkin 🎃, turkey 🍗, snowman ☃️, gift box🎁, etc. Test your emoji to make sure your emojis are universally compatible.

Holiday Email Content

While you’ve mastered the skill of creating great subject lines, it is also necessary to compile the actual email content!

After curating the perfect subject line, you’re halfway done. For the later part, i.e. email content, try to keep the emails customer-centric instead of brand or product focussed. Don’t overdo anything.

Here’s what you can and should include:

• Gift guides, catalogs & gift bundles.
• Countdown timers, gifs, images, footer. Avoid large-sized files like images, gifs, and long links.
• Coupon codes, discounts, gift cards.
• Links CTAs to landing pages with offers.
• Giveaways, offers & buy now deals.
• Festive puns & questions.

3. Perfect Email Design With MWB Templates

Engage users with a holiday-themed eye-catching email design. Simply put, make your email templates as exciting as you would decorate your homes, and revamp your website for holidays. Add a tinge of holiday visuals and gifs along with your brand logo.

Additionally, you can also use MakeWebBetter email and landing page templates for making your holiday email campaign a success. They will surely give you inspiration for creating holiday marketing emails.

MWB email templates are suitable for your target audience and multiple festive occasions. Choose your Christmas template, Halloween email template, New Year email template, etc.

4. Send Targeted Emails Using Segmentation

It’s not the holiday season everywhere (India, the Middle East). So, update, broaden, and double-check your customer lists. Make sure you send the appropriate holiday wishes to your subscribers and customers. This is where segmentation comes in.

According to DMA, marketers found 760% increase in ROI after using segmented campaigns.

Segmentation is also a crucial email marketing hack. To be clear, it is a technique for personalizing and customizing your emails including segmenting your email lists to more effectively reach your target audiences.

Segmentation emails are triggered by consumer activity and responsive email layout.

Segmented email marketing campaigns have 50% higher CTR than nontargeted email campaigns. Moreover, the last thing you would want is to turn away a potential client because they don’t connect with your message.

How Can You Segment Customers for Email Marketing Campaigns During Holiday Season?

There are CRMs like HubSpot that make your contact segmentation easier and more relevant for your business. Some criteria that you can segment your holiday email list via:

1. Demographic email automation for sending emails to particular age groups, buyers’ personas, gender, and location.
2. Silent or dormant customers who have not yet made any purchase.
3. Customer engagement frequency on websites.
4. High order value customers
5. Seasonal buyers and year-round shoppers
6. Price-sensitive customers that are usually coupon lovers
7. Customers who made no purchase recently within 3 months.

Above all, great user experience and engagement during your campaigns are directly proportional to how sound your segmentation strategy is. Therefore, consider using automated holiday email campaigns.

5. Mobile Responsive Holiday Email Marketing

The maximum number of emails are accessed by mobile users. Hence, make sure your email template designs are mobile-friendly. Besides, mobile shoppers are increasing. 39% of holiday shoppers made their purchases via smartphone in 2020.

Even though people shop on desktops too, mobile devices are catching up because:

• Shopping on mobile means scrolling on their phones without leaving their comfort zone similar to scrolling on social media.
• After COVID-19 mobile experience has become a priority for retailers and businesses. Mcommerce is not going away any time soon. It is an important trend in the eCommerce industry.

How To Mobile Optimize Your Emails?

Plan and strategize your holiday email marketing with mobile compatibility in mind.

1. Curate mobile-friendly and short subject lines. You need to button up your emails with a small screen experience.
2. Test CTAs for mobile. Don’t include multiple CTAs. Instead, add a single relevant CTA.
3. Use clear and compressed visuals for faster loading
4. Make sure your website is mobile responsive too because even though you might take the user to your store through email but you will
5. lose the user if the checkout experience is a nightmare!
6. Skip GIFs & emojis if they increase the size of the email content.
7. Use email templates that fit screens and resize accordingly.

6. Start Email Marketing Campaign In Time

Nothing is worse than rushing through everything. So, planning ahead of time and synchronizing your efforts will give the best results. This one is a simple holiday email marketing tip that only requires your dedication to customer experience.

Create a holiday email workflow and prepare a holiday calendar for staying updated with the latest dates of the upcoming holidays. Gear up beforehand for starting your email marketing campaigns for the holidays.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the season’s largest shopping days. You can start early with the Christmas sales promotion too. Don’t leave sending out your email campaigns until the last minute!

Consumers research & take 41 days time to finally shop for holidays. So, that’s an ample time frame to make them feel comfortable to shop with you.

In order to prevent subscribers from missing out on your holiday promotions, let them know in advance about the upcoming sales. Utilize countdowns to create FOMO among buyers.

Promote time-limited offers for inducing urgency and give special offs to early birds. Maintain a clever holiday email campaign timetable at all times.

It is preferable to start slowly and increase your efforts as the holidays draw near. Don’t, as a general rule, increase your year-to-date email frequency during the holidays by more than three times. Otherwise, people can unsubscribe because they might perceive your emails as spam.

When Should You Start Sending Holiday Emails?

The optimal periods to launch pre-Christmas email campaigns are regarded as the first and second weeks of November.

On December 22, the start of the Christmas season, open rates drop precipitously, and this pattern lasts through the beginning of the New Year. Most businesses begin taking their Christmas email marketing initiatives seriously in November.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the three greatest days to send emails. Moreover, Tuesday emails have the highest open rates, resulting in a better CTR and more traffic to the website.

7. Track Holiday Email Performances With AB Testing

With every new holiday email marketing idea, don’t forget to track its performance too. Hence, you require A/B testing of all aspects of your anticipated email marketing.

This covers

1. The look and feel of emails, subject lines, CTAs, and more.
2. Track email-open rates properly to fine-tune your targeting and campaign plan as you’re implementing it.
3. Email templates
4. Automated email campaigns
5. Mobile optimized emails

You must first test any holiday email templates you intend to send to your email list. Testing your Christmas or New Year’s emails doesn’t have to wait until the last minute.

Instead, you can send a test email right now to evaluate how the New Year email template’s layout, content, and graphics come across. It determines the deals, goods, services, or marketing campaigns that will generate the most interest when the Christmas season begins.

Beyond A/B testing, it’s important to track and archive user data and all site interactions. Then, you may use automation, machine learning analysis, and big data to acquire a better understanding of your holiday email campaigns.

Make sure to test one element at a time. As a result, you can develop predictive algorithms and improve a variety of factors, including the timing of emails, ideal product/service combinations for particular target audience segments, and more.

You can create UTM campaign codes and later use Google Analytics, to collect data. Finteza and Databox are fantastic substitutes for Google Analytics if you’re seeking more possibilities. It allows you to create and track sales funnels.

8. Send Post Holiday Emails To Show You Care

After this year’s holidays are over people will wait for the next year’s holiday. But, YOU DON’T! Your holiday email marketing campaign should take a short break and then start taking post-holiday follow-ups if you want customers to come back.

Create a post-holiday campaign to inspire customers to keep ordering from you in the future.
Alternatively, spread the word about a nice promotion, fresh arrivals, or any social service you did this year.

Returning clients are 9 times more likely to convert than new visitors.

Post-holiday emails can be used for two things, both of which encourage repeat business with customers:

• Engage new subscribers who signed up for your list in order to take advantage of a fantastic holiday deal, and nurture them to become loyal and recurring consumers.
• Send out your regular, non-holiday emails to your long-term readers as a “back to normalcy.”

Even if increasing holiday sales is a worthwhile short-term objective, your business will become more profitable as a result of the recurring clients that stick around beyond the holiday season.

Cheer Up Your Sales With These Best Holiday Email Marketing Tips

People will have their inboxes flooded with holiday emails. However, to stand out, you don’t need to do different things, you just have to do things differently. All these above tips are neither very typical nor very strategic.

Nevertheless, keep trying with these 8-holiday email marketing tips and measure the results. Whatever holiday you are celebrating, there is always something you can do to put yourself ahead of the pack.

Let your customer data inspire more email marketing concepts. With your holiday marketing strategies, amaze your customers and ensure that it is set up to produce the desired outcomes.

Many businesses, especially small ones, could benefit financially from the 2022 holiday season in order to thrive and expand in 2023. Given how beneficial email marketing is as a tool, it is understandable that so many companies utilize it to advertise their holiday specials and activities.

Your New Year’s gift to yourself might very well be some record ROIs if you employ a little imagination, the appropriate marketing tools, and intelligent data utilization.