‘Tis the season for festive playlists and twinkly, warm-hearted marketing campaigns. Yes, it’s Christmas, and it’s time to push for your end of year sales targets. Jolly! If the idea of creating a Christmas campaign fills you with dread, don’t worry. I have some ideas for festive content that goes beyond announcing special offers.

Tell a Story

People love feeling warm and fuzzy at this time of year. Give your customers and clients an insight into your business that gets into the festive spirit!

Whether you tell the story of how your business’ started in the form of the 12 days of Christmas, or you share some stories about the good work you do within your community, the idea here is to keep things merry and bright.

Help Your Customers Find the Right Gifts

Christmas can be a stressful time as well as a happy one, so offering some help or guidance is one of the most useful things you can do. Creating emails or blog posts with thoughtful gift guides are always popular at this time of year, especially if you write them as listicles, or even create a video to sit alongside it.

Share Other Companies’ Great Content

It might sound counter-productive, but trust me. Christmastime is awash every year with amazing festive content, and even if you do your best to ignore it from a commercial point of view, your customers will be seeing it anyway. So why not get involved?

Make a list of your favourite Christmas adverts (I plan to next month!), or write a take-down of the worst or most tone-deaf of the year. Create a definitive guide of the best Christmas deals and sales of the season. Point your customers towards this years’ top toys, most popular gifts or must-have fashions.

But while you’re doing all this, remember to share your own great Christmas offers, deals and content!

Brace Yourself for Christmas Complaints

It happens. Christmas is the busiest time of year for retail businesses, but it’s also busy further down the supply chain too. Whether you’re a toy shop or a print business, it’s a time of pressure and deadlines that just get shorter and shorter.

So, be aware that while you’re under strain, so is everyone else. No matter how amazing your customer service is, you are going to get a couple of complaints through the net. Head off the festive grumbling with content that makes lodging a complaint easy and efficient, and even better, create a blog post or send an email out that helps your customers and clients get the best possible service even at your busiest times. Include things like:

● Your busiest opening hours, so customers can plan their trip

● Realistic delivery times during the Christmas period, to manage expectations

● Advice on beating queues or avoiding delivery delays

● Offers of bespoke or personalised help and support

● Direct contact details

● Tracking information — you could even write a blog post about how customers and clients can track their goods.

My advice here is: be honest, and be accountable. Make sure your social media managers are totally up-to-date with your complaints procedures, and give your whole team the same information you give to your customers to make sure you’re all on the same page.

Need some help with your content and marketing over the Christmas period? Let’s talk today about how I can support you with a short-term digital marketing solution.

Using eShots - to create interest for your products, announce news or even shout about special offers - has become second nature to us in 2018.

Need a boost in sales? Send out an eShot. Want to share some amazing new lines with your best customers? Ping them an email. Got a surprise sale going on because of a larger-than-usual shipment? Get the message out quickly using an email newsletter.

But what happens when your eShot open rate…well…takes a nosedive?

Overcoming eShot Fatigue

It’s time to look at why your emails are starting to be ignored. Take a look at your metrics and have a think through these top five reasons your eshot is being left in the spam folder compost heap.

You’re sending too many emails

Subscribers want to hear from you, but there’s a limit to their love. If you’re sending out emails more than once a week, you need to think about whether each of these are relevant to all of the addresses you’re sending them to.Consider all the emails you’re sending and who they’re going out to, and answer the following questions:

● Does every recipient on your list need to get every email?

● Why are you sending so many emails?

● Could you say less and save your emails for really important or exciting news?

If you really feel that you need to be sending more than one eShot a week, it’s wise to make sure each of these emails are visibly different from each other and contain totally unique content each time.

A customer can forgive oversharing if it involves useful nuggets each time. What they can’t forgive is being bombarded with the same old stories over and over again.

2. You’re emailing the wrong people

You might have a long list of email subscribers, but how many of them are active? And how many of those email addresses have ever given you any sort of reciprocal attention?

Take a deep breath and count to 10. Yes, you’re going to have to scout through your subscribers to check their validity. It might take some time. Luckily, if you’re using an email service like Mailchimp, in-built stats and other shortcuts can make this a lot easier than trawling your way through a long list of emails manually.

Maybe they’re not interested in what you have to say anymore. Maybe they only signed up for an offer that’s now expired. Maybe, just maybe, they bought something from you in a previous role, but months later they just aren’t a relevant customer anymore and will never buy any of your products again.

Check for the number of eShots they open, and start getting ruthless. It also pays to check the types of emails they’re opening - move onto our next tip to find out why:

3. You’re giving the right content to the wrong people

Eh? What?

Yes. There’s every chance that your email subscribers are perfect for you, but you’re feeding them info they’re just not interested in. But as they say, “one man’s spam is another woman’s ribeye.”

Take a look at the types of emails your subscribers are actually opening. It will almost definitely vary.

Now it’s time to separate your followers into relevant lists so you can make sure you’re only sending certain types of emails to the customers who could benefit from them. Here are some list ideas to help you shuffle them around:

● Special Offer Snoopers: Only interested in sales, discount codes and offer

● Blog Readers: Only opens emails that promise interesting content, or links to blogs

● Hype-Hunters: Only wants to know about new and upcoming products

● Forgetful Customers: Usually clicks on emails that remind them to complete purchases.

4. Your emails are boring

Sorry to say it, but you just might not be making an impact.

It could be a case of the subject-line snoozies, or it could be that your customers have become accustomed to opening your emails and immediately regretting it. Either way, they’ve taken to avoiding you at all costs to quell the boredom.

Your company might not easily lend itself to fun, bright and breezy emails, but even the driest of subjects can be interesting to a customer who’s invested in what you do.

Take the time to think about how you could be putting yourself across in more attention-grabbing ways.

5. It isn’t clear what you’re selling

If you’ve sent a few emails out recently that have fallen flat, take another look at the content.

How many times do you actively tell your readers to ‘click here’ or ‘do this’ or ‘go there?

People who are quickly scanning an email need a prompt to hook them in. Being able to passively read through an email to get everything they need might be convenient for your customers, but it isn’t doing you any favours.

Drag them through to your website at all costs, where they can easily find products to buy, more information to read and even more ways to be reeled in by your marketing.

Putting it All to Work

After you’ve worked out what your customers are avoiding and you’ve learned how to get around it, it’s time to get working on improving your emails.

Figuring out what will catch their attention is one thing, but making sure you continue to offer them frequent mailings that keep them hooked and ready to buy from you is another kettle of fish.

● Check your statistics regularly to make sure you’re getting the opens you need and work with the information you find out to guide your content moving forward

● Don’t send out emails you wouldn’t read yourself. Stick to one or two important points and keep it snappy.

Still struggling? I’m an email marketing expert with more than 10 years’ experience under my belt. Give me a call or drop me an email today and http://www.laurenholden.co.uk/contact/about how we can collaborate to get your emails working hard for you.

Want More?

Recent Work