Last month, I warned you that “Winter Is Coming”. Okay, more like, the holiday email marketing season is coming, better known in retail circles as O-N-D.
And with October right around the corner, it’s time to take off the training wheels. Today, we’ll dive deeper into what you can do in October to make 2018 your best holiday email marketing season yet!
What if I’m not in retail? Do I really need to pay attention to holiday email marketing?
Great question and I’m so glad you asked.
Obviously, if you’re selling anything that people would buy during the holidays, then you care about OND a lot. You want to be top of mind and the go-to business for holiday gifts, entertaining, etc.
But this is also an important season for B2B marketers who want to get ahead of the next year’s budget plans. It’s important for nonprofits who want to capitalize on the season of giving. It even matters for influencers who aren’t necessarily selling a specific catalog of products on a regular basis.
Wallets are more open during this time of the year than any other, and October is when the rubber hits the road.
Ready to go?
Go off the beaten path
Confession: I am a total and complete hashtag holiday nerd. I shamelessly pull a list every year of the “national and obscure holidays” to reference as I plan my editorial content.
Now, I’m not recommending you jump on every single hashtag holiday that you can make a cheesy connection to, so please don’t misinterpret my intentions here. Don’t force it! But, you may just find inspiration from an offbeat holiday that resonates for your target audience or with your business mission. These connections can generate new eyeballs for you and make your email subscribers go, “Huh!”
(this is a happy sound, in case you can’t hear the way I’m saying it in my head)
For instance…
I’m an avid business book reader. During National Book Month, I’m planning social media posts to share my top 7 business books. I’ll also be asking for book recommendations, which is great for my TBR list and also great for engagement. You can follow me on Instagram to see this particular plan in action.
Do you operate in the Financial sector? It’s Financial Planning Month! Add a weekly email to your marketing mix, along with a few supporting social media posts to help guide your followers through budgeting and investing tips and how-tos.
And don’t miss Boss’s Day on October 16! This is a great opportunity to drive a special purchase (something made of leather or that smells of rich mahogany) for the boss, or simply to share what makes being the boss so special.
For a yearly calendar of holidays and even more ideas for your holiday email marketing campaigns, you can check out our friends at Small Business Trends.
Make a difference!
Did you know that October 12 is World Sight Day? Sunglass Hut used the opportunity last year to share a great cause.
Does your organization give back during Breast Cancer Awareness Month? Create a holiday email marketing campaign and accompanying social media kit to share this important mission. Enlist your audience’s support in your efforts!
The following example is from every teacher and scrapbooker’s dream business, Cricut. It’s less hard-sell, and more thematic, showcasing projects that incorporate the color pink and Breast Cancer Awareness themes like courage and hope.
What’s seasonal and relevant?
Fall is in full swing, and warm-weather themes/imagery, activities, flavors and more begin to dominate messages in this time frame.
It’s also not too early to be telling your fans about what you’ll have in store for them in the upcoming holiday shopping season. You can tease a coming holiday gift guide, or get started talking about Corporate Gifts to get first in line in the minds of your top customers.
October is a terrific time to reward your best customers in advance of the craziness that is the traditional retail season. Reward loyalty card holders with a special “Friends & Family” sale. Run a fall shipping event to drive larger volume purchases. Help your best friends stock up on their favorite products and be prepared for all that the holidays have in store.
Hey! What about October 31st?
The giant pumpkin in the room is Halloween at the end of the month, with some brands going all out on the holiday as early as September. Like Pottery Barn.
Goldstar events completely rebranded themselves for a day as “Ghoulstar” and featured upcoming spooky events in my area… freakishly fun! Plus, ghost emojis in the subject line. Heyo!
You don’t even need to be SELLING something to add value around Halloween. Beachbody Blog did an entire Halloween round-up email campaign, complete with tips and tricks to avoid eating all the kids’ leftover Halloween candy, spooky shake recipes, and workouts that incorporate your un-carved pumpkin.
Even if the whole goblins and ghouls thing doesn’t jive with your brand, there are some classier takes on Halloween…
BONUS DRINKING GAME:
Entertain yourself on Halloween evening between trick or treaters by opening up your inbox, alongside a bottle of your favorite alcoholic beverage. For every “No tricks, just treats!” subject line, take a shot.
*mostly kidding, but kind of not
What to do now for your holiday email marketing success:
- Make a list of 1-2 email campaign dates you want to target, and start producing your content now
- Curate social media content to support any specific posts you know you’ll want to have ready to rock and roll in October.
- Begin gathering your November and December holiday content, so that you aren’t scrambling when the big dates roll around.
Summin’ it up
October is a great practice run for the holiday email marketing craziness that you can look forward to in November and December. Make sure you take advantage of this season to get top of mind awareness with your best customers. Align your programs to the themes and holidays that resonate for your brand. Set a goal to have curated all your necessary image content for November and December campaigns during October, as well.
And if you haven’t already, make sure you take the action steps I outlined back in August to set you up for holiday email marketing success with all the new customers you’re about to acquire!
Next week, we’ll take a November deep dive and talk about your winning Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday email marketing campaign strategies.
Editorial Calendar planning is one of my all-time favorite things, by the way. If you want to ensure that you’re capitalizing on every opportunity to increase customer value through marketing channels like email and social media, let’s chat. I’d love to help you create an integrated marketing calendar for your business!
Thanks for sharing this with us, “E”. 🙂
A few things come up for me about this. First of all, you talk about how timely communication is good for the people toward whom your communicating, but as one of those people this doesn’t actually match my experience. The end of the year is when I get the most solicitations from people who want me to make a generous end-of-year donation, to the point where whenever I get a request like that I automatically unsubscribe from their list so it won’t happen again next year. On December 31, it’s not uncommon to get a solicitation every ten minutes.
Next, there’s a ton of images and not much text, and that really broke up the flow for me. I think the flow of your previous post that I commented on a few weeks ago was less broken up and easier to follow. If I were reading this as a regular reader, I probably would have stopped at the first image, because it looked like the end of the article. You might benefit from making the images smaller and wrapping the text around them so that they don’t break the flow.