A lot of people do their shopping at the very last minute. However, as an email marketer you cannot afford to carry out your holiday communication right before the holiday. For effective holiday marketing to take place, you need to send out your emails a while before the start of the holiday season. And that’s not all you should aim for! Read on for some more great tips to improve your holiday email marketing. Begin promoting your holiday communication well in advance. You can be assured that your competitors will do the same. A good idea would be to start sending holiday communication at least a month or two before the holiday season. For instance, communication for the November-December season should be sent out latest by the first of November. This is the ideal way to reach out to those who like to shop in advance, as well as inform those who plan to shop later, of your presence. Holiday communication should be sent throughout the holiday season. The frequency of communication should not be so frequent that it makes a negative impression on your customers. At the same time it should be consistent enough to leave a lasting impression and make an impact on your sales. You can reach out to your customers through various different catalogue versions. Each email sent by you can describe a specific product or a special offer. Planning and promotion is a big part of holiday email marketing. You need to decide which products and offers you want to give priority to and promote them accordingly. Make a plan that lays down what you will send as per a fixed time frame and follow it. Select a holiday template of your choice and begin creating your campaigns. All your special offers should have a specific time frame. Set actual dates for each offer and mark their beginning and ending dates. Place these dates in your schedule. It is important that you mark out the duration of each offer. Based on this schedule you can ensure that you provide customers with information for each offer with enough time for them to avail of it. Frequently segmenting your list will result in effective holiday email marketing. Analyze the results of your earlier campaigns, observe your click rate and study previous purchasing behavior. In this way you will be able to successfully target your customers with the right offers. Place the ‘Call To Action’ in the subject line of your email as well as in your website or landing page. This lets people immediately discover the purpose of your email. It is essential that your reputation is protected at all times. This can be done by working alongside your email service provider and ensuring that you have a good reputation. You may have the most creative and impressive looking emails but if you have a bad reputation you will not get any results. Take steps to prevent issues; test the deliverability of your email and fix problems as soon as they occur. Your communication mix must be tailored according to the type of industry you are in. If you are in the retail business, you could add certain elements to your marketing mix, such as reminding your customers about gift cards, providing them with different gift alternatives and special offers and informing them about your holiday timings.

If you are in the business to business industry you would need to take a different approach; sending personalized greeting cards, invitations to events and making donations are all good options.

If you are a non profit you could use your holiday cards to remind people of the joy of making donations as a gift. Give them real life examples of how contributions have changed the lives of those who are less fortunate. Thank previous donors for their contributions and send out emails highlighting the accomplishments of the year.

Have you got any more tips to improve your holiday email marketing? Do share them with us!

In the meantime , check out our new holiday email templates