The holiday shopping season provides a unique opportunity for your email marketing efforts to bear considerable fruit. With more and more customers seeking to find the perfect gift, or simply to cross another item off their crowded to-do list, a well-timed email with an enticing offer can make a huge impact.

The 2021 holiday shopping season is, for all intents and purposes, already underway. Even so, there’s plenty of time to make your email marketing strategy work for you. Here are a few tips to make the most of this all-important season.

Email Marketing Tips for the 2021 Holiday Season

1) Encourage your customers to buy now.

Due to ongoing supply chain shortages, as well as slower-than-usual shipping times, many customers are concerned about getting all their gifts delivered before Christmas morning. As such, they may not need much urging to make their purchases early in the season.

Create a sense of urgency, incentivizing your customers to make their purchases sooner rather than later. And make sure that all of your marketing emails include convenient buttons or links to “buy now.” These buttons should lead directly to product-specific landing pages or offering pages.

2) Segment your email list.

Email marketing works best when it’s personalized, allowing you to show each recipient products and offers that are truly relevant to their interests. This requires you to segment your email marketing list and target your content accordingly.

Some specific segments you might zero-in on include:

• High transaction customers, or VIPs
• Lapsed-purchases customers who you can try to win back
• Customers who have bought recently, and may be receptive to cross-sell or upsell efforts
• High average order total customers

Of course, segmenting by other demographics, such as age, can also be useful, especially when compared to one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter emails.

3) Consider different types of emails.

There are a number of different types of emails that can be helpful, and they don’t necessarily require you to reinvent the wheel. Instead, consider some tried-and-true options that have worked in seasons past. Just a few examples include:

• Holiday gift guides. Gift guides can be an ideal way to highlight top sellers, top-rated products, or simply products you’re really hoping to move during the holiday shopping season. Don’t forget to tailor the contents of your gift guide to the email segment you’re addressing.
• Welcome emails. You may have some new subscribers or new customers during the holidays; make sure you provide them with warm, seasonal greetings. Email open rates tend to be highest around the holidays, so these welcome emails won’t be in vain.
• Winback emails. Winback emails are targeted toward customers who at one point showed an interest in buying from your brand, but for whatever reason decided against it. These emails should remind people of your brand, and of the original products they were interested in buying. You might also showcase some newer products that may be relevant or related.

4) Ensure your emails are mobile-friendly.

This is an age-old email marketing talking point, yet you’d be surprised how many poorly optimized emails we continue to see. The important thing to remember is that, during this hectic season, most of your customers are going to be checking emails exclusively from their phones… and they won’t necessarily have time or patience to slog through emails that aren’t clearly legible.

Some basic considerations for ensuring mobile-friendly emails include:

• Make sure you use images that are clean and clear, but also compressed to ensure fast loading times.
• Keep the content concise, formatted with short paragraphs and sentences.
• Include CTAs that invite immediate next steps from your customers.
• Be sure that CTAs and any other link text are easy to see, even when readers are quickly scrolling through the email message.

5) Make sure you have product-specific pages.

In addition to developing strategic email messaging, you’ll also want to build out strategic landing pages. These pages should be focused on particular products or offers, making it easy to funnel email traffic directly to the specific thing they’re shopping for.

As with email messages, these product- or off-specific pages should be well-formatted, mobile-friendly, relatively light on text, and full of compelling CTAs.

6) Don’t delay.

With email marketing, timing is everything… and as we noted at the beginning, the 2021 holiday shopping season has truly already begun. Email marketers need to act fast, but thankfully, there’s still plenty of time to flesh out a viable end-of-the-year approach.

If you have any questions about developing a seasonal email marketing strategy, we’d love to hear them. Our team has much experience helping clients find success with email marketing, and we can even share some details about specific software solutions that we provide.

Whenever you’re ready to chat about holiday email marketing, reach out to the enCOMPASS team directly.