Planning for Xmas email marketing

dotMailer's step-by-step guide to planning and running successful Christmas email campaigns.

Where to start?

The opportunities surrounding the pre-christmas season can be daunting for marketers. Follow this step by step plan to help you ensure you have all the bases covered.

Step 1 - Analyse

Marketing data

The first step is to review your previous years' activity, and in particular - last year's campaigns and response metrics. What did you do that worked, and what did you do that should have been done sooner, or not at all?

The key to effective campaigns is understanding your customers and contacts: knowing what they respond to,  and how best to engage with them.

• * What did you do last year?
• * What worked best?
• * How did your contacts respond to your increased frequency?
• * What subject lines generated the most opens, and what offers, product lines and approaches generated the most click throughs and conversions?

Field sales and Competitors

As well as your own campaigns, take a look at what your competitors did. And speak to your sales teams to collect their anecdotal feedback and analysis on how customers behaved and what they responded to lastChristmas.

Your finance department

Speakto your finance department and get them to run you some key reports on which products/lines/offers performed best both last Christmas, and throughout the year.

Based on your findings from all this analysis you will be in a position to draw up an outline plan of what you want to offer in your pre-Christmas marketing, how you want to offer it, and who you want to offer it to.

Use the data you hold

Emails containing targeted content based on the data you hold on your contacts, have been proven time and again to return higher ROI than untargeted, 'blanket' campaigns.

Avoid the blanket approach at Christmas. By focussing on relevancy, you'll help to ensure your contacts don’t start to get turned off and unsubscribe by the increase in volume that you’re sending.

Step 2 - Plan

If you don't have all the contact data you need to power your targeting, it's not too late to collect it. Start running customer surveys or competitions now to collect data about your contacts which will help you determine the products they are most likely to be looking to buy and for whom. 

You can also use contacts' click behavior during the period to drive your marketing.

With dotMailer Enterprise you can build a segmentation query that allows you to, for instance, select those who have been clicking on links for male presents - across several different campaigns.  You can then target those with your top selling male gifts.

Think about the different email objectives and target content specifically. Your subject lines need to be relevant and feature your offer. 

With 40% more emails coming into the inbox at Christmas time, it's important to avoid annoying your clients with irrelevant emails and misleading subject lines.

Step 4 - Transactional Emails

Your transactional emails, such as invoices, customer updates etc. are also a potential source of cross-sell. Make sure your transactional emails are HTML and offer appropriate cross-sell offers.

And, if you can offer it, don’t forget that 22nd December lifesaver email offering next day delivery.

Step 5 - Send a Christmas e-card

Whether your organisation's focus is B2B or B2C, send your clients and customers a Christmas e-card. It helps build customer loyalty and brand recognition.

Don't make it a commercial message. Make it a feel good factor.

Grow your database

Step 5 - Viral Marketing

Make sure each of your emails and products on your site can be added easily to social networks and forwarded to friends.

This makes it easy for your contacts to tell their friends and family what they really want for Christmas and where they can find it.

Step 6 - Sign up link

If you include a link to sign up to your emails, those clickers and forwarded friends can easily sign up to your newsletters, increasing your databases.

Now is the time to really hone the ‘why they should sign up’ offering.

Make sure it is easy for visitors to sign up from both your site and your emails and that they know what added benefits they will get from offering you their contact details.

Dates for your diary

Christmas day and beyond

Fast forward to December 25th.

The big day may be over but your email marketing opportunities are definitely not.

In fact traffic to retail sites started to increase significantly on Christmas Day and traffic to online retailers peaked on Boxing Day.

The second Monday in December – 14th December
Traditionally sales on this day have increased year on year and it is the biggest online shopping day of December. What will you do with your email campaigns in the run up to this day to make sure you have a slice of the action?

Multi channel retailer
Got late night openings? Discounted days? Your email campaigns are a great way to inform your customer database. Make sure these campaigns are planned and counted when considering frequency and time of send.

Delivery Dates
What’s your latest order time and date for free delivery? What’s the latest they can order to get their goods time for Christmas? Don’t miss these critical contact points.

23rd December
It may be too late for online ordering and delivery but it’s not to late to direct customers to your store.

Christmas Day
How are you going to help your contacts spend their Christmas cash? When are you kicking off your January Sales?