My last post was dedicated to selling you on starting your Q4 email marketing plan EARLY. Today, I want to give you one high-impact action you can take in August to make your holiday email marketing more successful.
I teed this up with my Christmas in July post and I’m diving deeper today.
Lock in your holiday offers
This month, you have to decide what to offer your customers to make their season of giving all the more magical.
Why?
By solidifying your product and/or service offerings NOW, the bulk of your holiday email marketing campaign planning is DONE. You know what you have to talk about. Now, all you have to do is decide HOW and WHEN.
I spent a decade working with wineries on this. Wine and the holidays go together like peanut butter and pickles.
Hosting Thanksgiving dinner? You need wine.
Giving gifts to your large accounts? You could probably give them wine.
Family visiting for the holidays? Get out of the house and go wine tasting!
Wrapping presents at 11:30pm on Christmas Eve? Open a bottle of wine.
Oh, that’s just me?
But wine needs to be shipped, and that takes time. Wine can be intimidating to purchase, especially if your customer hasn’t tried the wine on offer. And the technology created to help wineries sell their product online ISN’T that easy for a customer to navigate. All that to say, ADVANCED PLANNING is gold here.
When you plan your holiday offers early…
…you can plan when your email campaigns go out based on shipping deadlines. You can put together your Ultimate Thanksgiving Wine Pairing to take the guesswork out of which wines to pair. And you can work through the grit of your technology ahead of time so that your email campaign doesn’t stall due to “technical difficulties.”
This applies in any business
Do you have a product or service that requires some logistics to get from point A to point B? You’ll want to plan your email around that lag time. Can your offering be packaged in a special way to better appeal to holiday shoppers? Put together that product bundle, or tailor your service to holiday entertaining or gifting! Do you need to monkey around in your Point of Sale system or online store in order for your holiday offers to be easy to buy? DO THAT MONKEY BUSINESS NOW, because the holidays are stressful enough as it is!
But HOW do I lock in my holiday offerings, Erica?
Here are some questions to help you plan your holiday offers:
Which holidays do I want to spotlight?
Q4 is chalk-full of days and dates of note. What holidays does your business have a natural fit with?
Columbus Day
Halloween
Thanksgiving
Christmas
New Year’s Eve
Think about “retail holidays” too, like Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday, etc.
Highlight two or three that you’d like to capitalize on!
What does my customer want on these holidays?
What does your ideal customer do, need, or desire around the holidays you’ve selected? Make a list of 3-5 ways your product or service helps your customers on each of those holidays. This ultimately becomes the heart of your holiday offers.
Ask for feedback.
Ask your team to give you some input on your ideas. Go on social media if you don’t have a team. Ask your customers if you haven’t already.
Then, lock in your holiday offers.
By now, you’ve probably narrowed down your ideas to 1-2 per holiday. Can’t choose between them? You can a/b test them, or run with them both! You can even feature up to three products or offerings in a dedicated campaign. Just be sure to put one in the main spotlight whenever possible.
BONUS: Put your email campaigns on the calendar
With your offerings by holiday selected, reverse engineer your dates. If your holiday offerings require shipping, or are best delivered in advance of a holiday, put your dedicated email campaign at least one week ahead of that deadline! This gives you ample time to send your email out and do some targeted follow-up, without being so far out that you aren’t relevant to the holiday.
SUMMIN’ IT UP
By selecting product and service offerings that will make your customers’ lives better during Q4 now, you are also making YOUR OWN LIFE BETTER! You give yourself plenty of time to strategize and get feedback on the most compelling offers. You aren’t racing against the clock when it comes to smoothing out any tech or staffing requirements to make your customer experience smooth. And you will enjoy a healthier bottom line because your email marketing campaigns are proactive, timely, and relevant.
Set aside the time RIGHT NOW – take a day in the next week to go through the process outlined above. This is the heart of your holiday success.
Need an outsider’s opinion? I’d love to help.