In yesterday's post, I shared a few statistical predictions for online retail in the holiday season. Turns out, experts from Forrest Research expect an impressive 8% increase in online retail compared to 2008. That's great! There's nothing like seeing the orders pile up on your fabulous e-Commerce website.
How do you plan to get people to your fabulous e-Commerce website in time for the holiday season? Twitter marketing? Sure! Facebook pages? Why not! Awesome SEO and timely press releases? The more the merrier!
But don't overlook one of the most traditional ways to attract new customers and encourage previous customers to come on back. I'm talking about direct email marketing.
When it comes to spicing up your email marketing campaigns, there's no time like the present.
Last week, the Direct Agents blog shared some helpful Holiday Marketing Tips especially for e-mail marketing. I'd like to pass some of these tips along now for you to hopefully use in the very near future.
1) Don't be afraid to repeat yourself.
Don't be afraid to repeat yourself. Heh, I couldn't resist.
The holiday season is traditionally defined as the months of November and December... that's less than a sixty day window you have to reach your target audience, get your point across and get them a-buying.
If you haven't already, grab a calendar and consider how many times you want to blast out your email marketing campaign. Your goal should be to effectively reach as many people as possible without spamming them silly.
Keep in mind that they have the ability to opt-out of receiving said emails, so if anyone gets super annoyed, it's really their own doing.
2) Make a contact list, check it twice!
Obviously, one of the most important elements in your direct email marketing campaign is the actual list of recipients. Make sure to tailor each campaign carefully so that it's sent to people who will actually find it useful, and who stand the greatest chance of converting to customers.
Don't blast your direct email out to those who aren't relevant, or those who have opted out of your subscription!
3) Choose your discounts carefully.
MarketLive and The E-tailing Group published a recent study that advised against doling out discounts simply for the sake of attracting new customers. Chairman and founder of MarketLive, Ken Burke, noted that dramatic discounts boasted by some online retailers in the 2008 holiday season ended up doing more harm than good; some companies barely covered their expenses and even damaged their own reputation in the process. Ouch!
Be sure to carefully plot out what types of discounts you can offer, on which products, and with what limitations. The goal is to encourage sales without ending up totally broke.
4) When it comes to the design, shine.
Remember: you're sending emails out to dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of recipients, and you're sending them on behalf of your company. The holidays are a time for fun, festive colors and pictures... it's totally okay to work these into your emails!
Consider designing your holiday marketing email with stylish aesthetics, eye-catching graphics, and appealing text. So long as you do this within reason, you'll make a great impact on your contacts.
5) Test, check, fix, optimize... and test again!
As with any email marketing campaign, two important concepts to keep in mind are functionality and optimization. Make sure you test send all of your direct email marketing campaigns to a variety of email addresses within your company. This offers an invaluable chance to check, recheck, and check once more for pesky errors that are total turn-offs:
- broken images
- text alignment issues
- inconsistent font sizes
- broken links
And my number one pet peeve:
Once you've checked all the bugs, check for the opportunities:
- Are you incorporating relevant keywords that hammer home the purpose of the email?
- Does your anchor text also have title attributes?
- Do your images also have alt attributes?
Just because search engines may not index this email doesn't mean you shouldn't keep your optimization skills sharp and sophisticated.
Keep these direct email marketing tips in mind for your upcoming holiday marketing email and your contacts will be sure to have a holly, jolly inbox.
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