Effective Holiday Email Marketing in 2021: Types, Tips & Tools

Holidays are great if you want to increase the sales, conversions, and ROI for your eCommerce business. And personalized holiday emails play a major role in bringing traffic to your website to churn out even more profits. With effective email marketing, you can reach out to prospects who have already engaged with your eCommerce store.

Not only that but you can also reach out to your leads to nurture them further. With holiday email campaigns you can show your customers the value your business offers particularly during the holidays. And with this article, we are going to drill down on effective holiday email marketing in 2021 for your eCommerce business with some tips and tools.

Types of Emails to Send During Holidays

The days of set it and forget it for promotional email campaigns are gone. To make your email campaigns successful and effective at what they are intended to do, you have to consider your goals, types of audience, and possible ROI. You must also track outcomes to improve each future campaigns. Below are the three major types of emails you need to review and update to send during the holidays.

1. Welcome Emails:

Welcome emails have high open rates which make them an essential tool for your marketing. This type of email helps you to start off the personal relations with customers on a good note which helps in enhancing the customer lifetime value. Thus, here’re a few things you should do to optimize your welcome email.

• Send a welcome email as soon as they have made a purchase with your brand.
• Make sure that your brand is recognizable by placing a logo in high resolution reminding who is contacting them.
• Allow them to engage by recommending products to continue shopping.
• To make sure that customers engage with your welcome email, offer them some sort of incentives like coupon codes or free shipping.

2. Relevant Promotional Emails:

Holiday shoppers would want to know what deals and promotional offers you are running this time around. And the best way to do so is to send an email consisting of the latest relevant promotional offers. Giving customers insights into your holiday specials will set their expectations. Here’re a few things you should include in your promotional emails.

• Shipping details with the final delivery date.
• Gift Wrapping Options
• Customer service contact details
• Gift card services

3. Abandoned Cart Emails:

Let’s face it, no one wants an abandoned cart. Still, on average, over 69% of the shopping carts get abandoned. Cart abandonment means that there was something wrong that led the customer to feel incomplete in their shopping journey. For the holiday season, most people abandon cart due to higher shipping costs, better deal available elsewhere, or product is Out of Stock. Here’re a few ways to deal with cart abandonment.

• Offer free shipping to deal with the shipping costs. However, it’s not possible for everyone, especially when you need to ship internationally. Still, you can try to increase your average order value to offer free shipping. Send emails with an offer like “All orders above $100 get free shipping.”
• If your customers are getting a better deal elsewhere and abandoning your carts still all is not lost. Find some evidence that offering a discount can bring back the customer, then only pick that route. If all your customers are going to competitors that offer products at cheaper rates, then you have a bigger problem to deal with. What you can do instead is create FOMO and scarcity. Send an email with “Back in Stock”, “Limited-time offer”, etc. to trick customers that the product is scarce and might not be available after some time.
• How you deal with customers who have shown interest in Out of Stock products when they are back in stock is also important to increase your sales. First, make sure that you have an ample amount so that product is never out of stock. And if it does how you respond to customers can make or break the deal.

Tips for Successful Email Marketing Campaign:

Let’s look at the holiday email strategies and campaigns you should run for a successful 2021 holiday season.

1. Find what was trending last year

It’s too time-consuming to reinvent the wheel. We already have some noteworthy email marketing campaigns from 2019 which would prove to be catalysts for this year’s success.

• A rollover from last year can be holiday gift guides that can help you curate your best sellers, top-rated and other products. Presented and marketed rightly, it can be a goodie bag for your customers.
• Been a while since a customer or a group of customers have purchased from you? Segment them and send a winback email reminding them you’ve got an offer for them. Also, remind them why they were interested in your brand along with recommending related products.
• Make your email contents and graphics mobile friendly so that they load fast enough. Pay extra attention to entice customers with short & concise content and CTAs.
• Holidayfy your eCommerce store and emails with holiday-centric themes and imagery.

2. Plan in Advance

With poor and late planning from your side for the 2021 holiday season might end up having low sales volume from the customer side. Planning your email holiday campaigns in advance is as important as planning for the holiday season itself. It helps to tease out the special deals you are going to run to your existing customers.

When you plan in advance, you’ll have better pieces of content to improve sales and conversions. You’ll have time to review previous similar campaigns that worked like a charm so that you can implement them for an even better result this time.

3. Target Segmented List

You might have tons of email IDs of customers which makes it hard for you to target them in a more personalized way. When you segment your customers into different groups, it will allow you to show relevant products more easily to each segment.

You should consider segmenting customers in groups such as VIP Customers, High order value customers, or segment them based on their age, location, and income. Once segmented, target each group to their own liking to increase sales and conversion ratio.

Summing Up:

Email marketing still poses a great amount of importance when it comes to targeting your existing set of customers. ‘Tis one of the high-converting channels to drive customers to your eCommerce store, especially during the holiday season. What you just have to do to leverage it for your benefit is to optimize key emails such as welcome emails, relevant promotional emails, and abandoned cart emails to drive more traffic.

With this article, we have delved deep into optimizing your email marketing campaigns by suggesting some tips and tools. Still, you need help with your email campaigns, then you can consult our eCommerce experts who will help you out from planning to executing your email holiday campaign for 2021.