Sleigh Your Email Marketing Plans this Holiday Season
Email marketing can be a really important part of your brand.
It helps you stay top-of-mind with your audience, lets you stay in contact with them, and gives you an avenue in which to make offers when you’re ready to sell.
If you’re needing a bit of inspiration and some concrete ideas to sleigh your email marketing plans this holiday season, this episode is for you. Tap the play button above to listen or keep reading for the show notes!
BTW: Have you seen the All-Content Planner in my shop? The downloadable planner will help you with planning out all the things this season, including your email marketing schedule.
#1. Freebie Funnel
Whether you currently have an email subscriber base, or you’re just listening for tips because you want to set one up, the #1 tip I can give for email marketing at ANY time of year, not just the holidays, is to get at least one or two freebie funnels set up!
A freebie funnel is just a shorter way of saying that you offer a freebie, and that you have a way of capturing emails automatically when you give your freebie away.
Along with that, you may have extra bonuses or offers that you direct your subscribers to after they subscribe for your freebie. This could be in the form of a landing page with an offer that they are brought to after they subscribe, or maybe a webinar you’re hosting, or they are put right into an email sequence.
An email sequence is where multiple emails are sent to your subscriber over time in order to “nurture” that new subscriber – “nurture” is an email marketing term that just means you’re keeping in regular contact with them so they don’t forget about you.
The email sequence is usually automated, and set up on the back-end of your email platform. That way, when someone subscribes, you can attach specific sequences for them to go through based on how they signed up – whether that be through a freebie, or even through buying something from you.
If you don’t have a freebie funnel set up yet, or don’t know how, do a quick search on how to set one up with your specific email platform to get started!
#2. Abandoned Cart Sequence
Have you ever been shopping online, and added something to your cart, only to forget about it or want to take your time making a decision, so you just leave it in your cart and go do something else? After this, have you ever noticed you get an email that says something like, “Hey, you left items in your cart!” or “Finish your purchase before it’s gone!”
I’ve seen these as a pop-up in your browser, or even a text message. And of course, I’ve seen these come in as an email – which in marketing is called the “Abandoned Cart Sequence”.
Having this set up simply allows you to keep track of what your potential customers are interested in, and gives you an automated way for you to help them along with their purchasing journey.
Your email provider may even have an “Abandoned Cart Sequence Template” that you can use as a starting point, which might be super helpful if you’re unsure how to get started. You just need to connect your email provider to your online store in order to use it and activate it.
If you don’t know how to do any of this, I’d recommend contacting your email provider’s customer support or looking up tutorials that show you how to do it yourself. An abandoned cart sequence is known to recover up to 10% of sales, so don’t sleep on this one!
#3. Include Holiday Content Where It Makes Sense
You might have a regular newsletter that goes out every week or every other week, so don’t stop that just because it’s the holidays. Ideally, you’d add even a few more emails that go out during the holidays and include your holiday content where it makes sense – because staying in front of your customers during this big season will keep you top of mind.
You could send specific emails for sales or fun campaigns, or new products or services, as well as figure out the most appropriate places to add in what you’re doing to your regular newsletter.
Whether you’re promoting sales or events or exclusive holiday content for your subscribers, including it in your emails where appropriate – even if you feel like you’re saying the same thing over and over again – will increase your chances that they’ll actually see it and take action.
The common marketing rule is that a customer needs to see something at least 7 times before taking any action.
So for example, if you send out specific emails for your promotions, but then also add it to your regular newsletter, your subscribers will naturally see it more, and you’ll get more chances at the sale.
#4. Extra Emails
During this holiday season, it’s OK to ramp up your email schedule and send a few extras out. People are going to be bombarded with emails, so they might not see yours, or they might not have time for it when they do see it, and then it gets buried in their inbox.
If you want to send out some reminders about sales or events that you’re having, that is totally okay, and really, something you SHOULD do! You don’t want people to miss out on what you’re offering, because again, the rule of thumb is that a customer needs to see something at least 7 times before taking any action.
This does NOT mean you send 7 emails of the same exact thing – you’re going to have to get more creative than that! But if they see it in a few emails, then they see it on a few Instagram posts, and then they hear you talking about it in a couple podcasts, you’ll get to that number pretty quickly.
It could take more times, could take less, that’s just the general statistic. Just be careful with this one – you don’t want to overdo it or you’ll risk getting unsubscribers!
#5. Segment Your List
Within your email provider, you can separate subscribers based on their preferences and interests. For instance, if you sell courses, but you also sell digital products, and maybe even host in-person events, that could be three very different types of audiences that you’re attracting.
Some of them may be interested in all three offerings, but most may only be interested in one or two.
Think about the different things that you offer, and the types of individual audiences that are attracted to those things. It might be worth splitting up your subscriber list into what is called “segments”, so that you can send specific things that interest each group, to their different segments.
The major perk to this is that you won’t be bombarding your entire list with things that just don’t interest them, and risk someone unsubscribing. It also shows your audience that you care about their individual interests and actually do want to help them or serve them where they prefer. You can of course send a general newsletter to your entire list, but at least with segmentation, you’ll have the ability to only send certain things to certain subscribers based on their preferences.
There are a couple ways you can do this: You can segment based on the subscriber actually checking a box and choosing for themselves whenever they subscribe to your list, or you can segment based on the freebies that they subscribe to or the products that they buy (this is how I do it). For example, someone who buys the All-Content Planner Template in my shop may be interested in different things than the customer who buys a VIP Brand Design Day.
So this way, I have the ability to target specific things to each.
Now, full transparency, I don’t utilize segments feature that often – but that’s because my subscriber base and my shop offerings are fairly small, so I feel like most of my audience is interested in most of what I offer, and I don’t really have large groups with different interests at this point. However, I did go ahead and set my segments up on the back end of my email provider so that when I do want to utilize this feature, I have the ability to.
So for you, even if you don’t see a reason to use segments just yet, you can at least go ahead and set it up on the backend so that you at least have that option this holiday season, and in the future.
The thing about segments is it can be kind of hard to set them up after the fact, after they’ve subscribed, so it’s really easier and less of a headache if you set them up first and then capture that data as you get subscribers.
#6. Use ONE CTA
A CTA is a “call to action”, which is just a term for how you ask someone to do something. For instance, in emails, your call to action is usually that “buy now” button or “read more” link or whatever it is that you want your subscribers to do.
The key here is that you only want to have one main CTA in an email because you want to be clear and very specific about what you want your subscribers to do.
You don’t want to have 17 different links in one email because then they’re going to have decision fatigue. They’re not going to know what to click, and if they want to click on them all, they’re going to get overwhelmed, mark it as unread, and then probably forget about it.
According to Hubspot, “a single call-to-action can increase clicks by over 371% and sales by around 1617%.”
Knowing that, when you send emails, try to only include one clear CTA button, whether that’s “listen to my podcast” or “check out the sale”.
Now that’s not to say that you can’t have a few more highlighted links as text within your email. The call-to-action that I’m talking about is usually a button, it’s big, it’s bright, and it catches your attention as you scroll through the email. You know what you’re clicking when you click it.
If you want to include a couple extra links to different things that are just highlighted text links, that makes sense and you can do that, but your main CTA should only be to one thing.
Depending on the length of your email, you can duplicate that CTA button and include 2-4 of that same button sprinkled throughout your e-mail so that your subscribers see it several times, but it’s the same button that leads to the same thing.
What is the main thing that you want your audience to do when they open your email? What’s the most important thing that they can do? That should be your call to action button, so make it perfectly clear so there’s no question.
#7. Spruce Up Your Subject Lines
According to HubSpot, “64% of email recipients decide to open or delete an email based on the subject line.”
That’s a high number!
Knowing that, I want to make sure my subject lines are doing their JOB.
To up your subject line game, you’ll have to do some research:
You can use different tools like google, pinterest, ChatGPT or even your own inbox to help you find subject lines that just hit, that make you want to open them, and get some inspiration from them.
Another great tool I learned about recently is SubjectLine.com. This tool uses AI to help you come up with the best subject lines, based on ideas you’ve already come up with. When you enter your ideas, it will give you a score from 0 to 100. It scores based on email industry standards, such as the number of characters, urgency, length, and specific words you include. It will give you a final score, and then give you ideas on how to make your subject line better.
I personally have been using it for email subject lines AND I’ve been trying it out for other things like podcast and blog titles, and I’m really liking the ideas it comes up with.
Technically podcast and blog titles are different from email subject lines, but I do like the inspiration it gives, so I’ve found this tool is pretty useful for emails and for inspiration. If your goal is to get people to click on your email based on what the subject line says, you’re going to want to bookmark this tool and start using it!
Make Plans & Get It On The Calendar
Coming up with email marketing plans, especially over the holidays, can be daunting. Don’t feel like you have to have some well-oiled machine to send emails this season. Everyone started somewhere, including myself, and I’m still learning, so making plans, getting something on the calendar to send out – and using the tips from today’s episode – is a really great place to start.