Last updated: Oct 18, 2016  admin

Make your seasonal strategy sing with our tips for devising festive email campaigns.

The festive season provides marketers with a range of opportunities, both for generating revenue and for getting creative juices flowing. But if past years are anything to go by, competition in the inbox will be fierce, so you’ll need to make your messages work even harder if you’re going to get a share of your subscribers’ seasonal spend.

Here are some of our top tips to help you take advantage of the year’s peak retail period:

1. Plan your messaging strategy

Plan the entire customer journey, and develop the story you want to communicate along the way. Map out each interaction from the subscribers’ perspective, and be sure to include service and transactional messages to make the journey complete. Once done, it will be easier to identify additional opportunities for certain groups of subscribers based on their preferences and patterns of activity. Identifying opportunities to send a higher frequency of messages targeted at specific subscribers can have a significant impact on your revenue.

2. Festive look and feel

Although time-honoured design elements like Santas, sleighs-bells and snow come in for much criticism, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with opting for a traditional approach – particularly if it fits with your overall brand identity. Moreover, a tongue-in-cheek or humorous approach can be highly effective when well delivered. It all depends on your chosen festive strategy, and the way in which your individual emails feed into it.

Your strategy should inform all aspects of your campaign, and if you devise one early enough you have the golden opportunity to produce a well-organised series of emails, perhaps ramping up the festive content gradually as you move towards December 25. Just make sure your content is on-brand at all times, and try to avoid lurching from one piece of creative to the next by planning well in advance.

And if you do take the conventional approach, don’t just paint a festive theme on top of an otherwise ordinary email. Embrace it fully, perhaps honing in on one aspect of the holidays like ‘celebration’ or ‘party’, or tie in give-aways and competitions with the season, ensuring prizes complement the theme.

Another classic mistake is to limit creativity by buying into arbitrary rules and guidelines for seasonal content. Color is a good example, and many designers seem to feel that festive campaigns must feature lots of red and green. As the creatives behind Bordeaux wine’s innovative campaign have shown, however, breaking the mould can be highly effective.

3. Develop a seasonal subject line strategy

Subject lines are an excellent way to communicate the story or concept you’ve developed. So don’t leave them to the last minute – develop them in line with your seasonal strategy to make full use of the space. Your subject lines can be used to reinforce brand values, promote USPs or alert customers to cut-off dates for delivery.

4. Frame your discounts

If discounts form part of your seasonal strategy – and if you’ve devised your campaign early enough ensure your audience is aware of the full price of your items before the discounts kick in. We’re talking here about more than just displaying the old price next to the new in a single email. Use subject lines wisely. If you intend to introduce generous discounts on big-ticket items, for example, consider sending a series of emails where the full prices are displayed in the subject lines, and repeat them again in the email copy. That way, when you start to promote your sale, recipients will be more likely to appreciate the depth of your discounts, and your emails may have greater impact. Framing discounts is a proven formula, but it’s only possible if you plan your strategy in advance.

5. Frequency, urgency and repetition

Don’t be afraid to increase the frequency of your emails at this time of year. In our experience, peoples’ expectations and tolerance levels change during the festive season. Consumers shop and buy more during this period, so it stands to reason that they want to hear about more offers and opportunities, and will be more receptive to store invites or inspiring ideas. Of course you should continue tracking metrics just as you would normally, and it’s worth being extra fastidious with unsubscribes.

Think about replicating the shopping experience in email format by displaying lots of products, and by keeping copy to a bare minimum. When consumers are crashing up to the festive deadline and they just need to buy things, stacks of copy and very few products in your emails are going to be as off-putting as those annoyingly over-attentive shop assistants on the high street.

Remember also that consumers will be spending most of their weekends in November and December shopping, so your campaigns are likely to have added impact. Use email subject lines to repeat key offers on a regular – perhaps even daily -“ basis. And look to drive footfall through your retail sites by highlighting exclusive in-store deals and bargains, paying particular attention to emails sent at the latter end of the week and those classic Friday/3pm mailings. Finally, consider ways to generate a sense of urgency. Time-limited offers are particularly powerful at this time of year, as are daily countdowns. Again, if you’ve planned out your seasonal strategy well in advance, you’re in a position to stagger subject lines and key messages so their intensity increases towards the end of your campaign.

6. Use your data

During this period, subscribers’ preferences and purchasing patterns may be dramatically different from those witnessed throughout the rest of the year. But this doesn’t mean your data is obsolete when devising festive campaigns. You could, for example, analyze data from past holidays. This will help you assess the shopping patterns of your subscribers, allowing you to identify opportunities for time-based segmentation and targeting. You can also look at which content, message layouts and frequencies have worked best in the past to get a head start on any testing you’ve scheduled. Don’t forget to include online and off-line revenue stats to give you the full picture.

7. Take the chance to collect up-to-date preferences

Consumers’ interests change, particularly around this time of year, so developing content that will generate clicks is a great way to collect data for additional segmentation and targeting. Value-added content can be particularly effective, especially when it doesn’t have an overt sales message. Buyers’ guides and gift finders can help you identify what your subscribers are interested in, plus these are useful tools that can generate interest. Meanwhile, a well-developed ‘Wish-list’ campaign can generate interest from new customers and help to expand your subscriber base. If you plan on using inferred preferences, be sure to check that your privacy policy reflects this.

8. Don’t forget about transactional mailings

If this is a peak sales period for you, your subscription process and transactional messages are likely to achieve more reach. It’s worth undertaking an audit of all your processes and triggered mailings – from welcome messages to sales confirmations and post-purchase surveys – to make sure they are all up to date and functioning properly. And if you’re planning to increase your frequency over this period, why not give your subscribers the chance to opt out of your festive mailings separately. That way your subscribers can avoid this content specifically, but remain in touch once the season is over.

Festive treats

Need some more inspiration? Here are some of our favorite festive campaigns:

• Inventive use of wintery colours replaces conventional greens and reds

• Perfect marriage of copy and animation plays cleverly on the word ‘flurry’

• Details seal the deal. From the quivering copy to the dog’s tongue, you notice something new each time

View animated email

•Refreshing take on a traditional Christmas email

•Atypical colourway combines effectively with bold, simple messaging

• Snowflakes constructed ingeniously using the letter P from the Prezzo logo

• Clean, engaging and impactful – a wonderful effort by Australian PR firm Clarity

• Proves you don’t need to over-engineer emails to hit the mark

• Basic animated colour change combined with a series of clever, punchy copy lines delivers variety and keeps recipients engaged without going overboard