Have you already started to plan on your holiday campaigns?  Because if you want to be successful, then you have to start doing everything early and now it’s time to start.  On top of that, the competition is right behind you, with all sorts of campaigns, and you have to find a way to stand out somehow.

Analyze

The first step is to review all of the campaigns that you sent last year:  opening rates, clickthrough rates, unsubscribed newsletters, recommendations, social media sharing, the highest conversion rates, the best opening hours and days, the subject lines, sending frequency, etc.  Apart from that, you should see what worked and what was successful, what worked as expected and what failed.  You have the most important indicators at your disposal.

Your research should also include an analysis of what consumers preferred, how they interacted in general during the campaigns that you ran.  This research will also give you an opportunity to review the lists, to see who your inactive subscribers were, to segment your database and to communicate with every segment in a relevant way.
 

Planning

You can start communicating at an early stage.  According to a study that Smith Harmon conducted in 2010, in 2009 most companies started their holiday campaigns as early as October, but there are still companies that start their communication phases even in June or July, with small incentives.  It is not necessarily a must to send individualized messages.  Since it’s September, just to start preparing early, you can include in the weekly/monthly newsletter that you normally send to your subscribers a secondary section whereby you announce that you start preparing your holiday offers. 

You can either promote the special holiday newsletter and may suggest them to subscribe to it (it will contain a number of specific messages, all along the holiday period) or you can do it differently.

More specifically, this pre-holiday section should focus on a survey whereby you should try to find out what your prospects prefer, to talk them into updating their profile, and you should send them products that match their profile.  Your survey should also include a checkbox whereby to update the reception frequency.  It’ll help you stay clear of redundancy and never get into the junk folder again, since all of the campaigns will make the most of the inbox of your prospect.  There are two types of surveys: one that only includes the personal preferences of the subscriber and one that should help you provide them with proper suggestions of gifts that they can give to your prospect’s friends and partners.

1.    “What is your wish list? Let us help you”
2.    “Holidays are nice, but isn’t it a pain to pick up the right present for your loved ones? Let us help you.”

The next pre-holiday message should also involve another section included in the general newsletter;  it can include product reviews of products that your potential clients may be interested in, based on the information that have about them. Product-reviews are a decisive factor too for the segmentation and for increasing the relevant of the next deliveries.

Pre-holiday messages can be used efficiently in transactional messages too.  If transactions are performed in the month of September, these messages can include, as a secondary topic, an announcement regarding some holiday offers.  It is advisable that they should have some connection to the production they’ve just bought.
“Thank you for buying X.  We want to help you prepare yourself in due course.  We have prepared a holiday special offer for you, something that would be quite a match for whatever you bought from us.”

You should start hard-selling in November

1.    Have you collected enough data about them from the surveys that you included in the pre-holiday message?  It’s time you personalized your messages and send them offers to products that can cover satisfy their interests and preferences.

Note: Before actually starting the campaigns, we recommend you to test.  Run tests with various subject matters (that include personalized messages or offers and discounts), From name, layouts, to be ready on time.

2.    Include product reviews of those how purchased products corresponding to the profile that you approach.  You can put them near every product that you promote: “See how useful this product was to X”.

Note:In order to have these product reviews handy, the communication with those who can offer them to you should start early on, June or July, and you can reward them with a discount or a discount voucher, if offered.

3.    Each promoted product should also have a deadline. “You have a chance to get this for the best price, but not later than…”.  In order to stimulate recipients even more, they you can promise free of charge delivery, if they buy it up to a certain date. Accelerating the offers is highly efficient if benefits are proportional too.

4.    Cross-sell. Don’t rush on an offer spree, because you may confuse your recipients.  In every email that you send for the holidays, you should focus on three relevant offers. In exchange, you can make the most of it in a different manner.  You can suggest them something for each one of these offers.  For example, if you sell white goods and want to publish the offer that you have for a cooker, then you can also suggest an extraction hood or a special cooktop, etc.  As I was saying in the beginning, you can cross-sell in transactional messages too.

5.    Offer the product for testing.  This is a way of getting sales leads.  If your subscribers are interested in an offer, you can lend that product to them so that they can test it for a week or so.  This is just another way of stimulating them and of arousing their curiosity.

6.    Frequency. This is perhaps a key-element of your campaign.  We know that you want to communicate more intensely and more frequently, but you have to consider the floor of emails that your subscriber will be subject to.  If you introduced a check-box in the pre-holiday message survey to see what the reception frequency is, then you should stick to the results and do proceed accordingly.  Even if that recipient gets your mail once a week and not every two days, that does not mean that they are not going to see your message.

7.    Interactivity & engagement. You should somehow highlight the telephone numbers readers can use to call various agents, in order to get more details about the products readers are mostly interested in.  Just give them a way of getting online information about the delivery of these products, depending on the date when the products are ordered. And you can direct them towards a calendar.
Give them social media sharing buttons too.  You have a chance of enhancing your database with a new subscriber, but also with a new client.  For social media sharing purposes, you can also prepare a special emailing campaign titled “Your wish list”, and the subscriber should be stimulated into sharing it in their personal Facebook and Twitter profiles.

8.    Shopping cart abandonment messages. Don’t just get over it... If they did not complete the order, it does not matter that they are lost clients altogether. You should include these types of messages when you plan your holiday emailing campaign. “What about people who abandon the cart?  What do they do?”  Just make a separate list and communicate with them differently.  Give them a discount or free delivery to stimulate them into coming back and completing the order.

Post holiday

You can continue to communicate with clients and prospects even after holidays are over.  On one hand, you can communicate with those who became clients and you can request reviews of the purchased products.  You can stimulate them into reviewing your products, by rewarding them with a discount for certain products that may have remained in stock during the holiday campaign.
You can also send them a feedback survey to find out more about how your communication went during the holidays. This will be useful for your future holiday emailing projects.
It is recommended that those who have not become your clients, but have interacted in some way with your messages should also get this survey, which should feature the most popular products that have been ordered.