I would start by taking all of your ideas and just throw them on the calendar. Don’t worry about dates and audiences at first. Once you have your ideas down
you can start organizing the calendar by answering these questions:
- How often do I want to send emails?
- Which segments do I want to send this to?
- Will there be a special offer?
Let’s dive into those questions a little more.
How often do I want to send emails?
It’s the holiday shopping season, and consumers are looking to spend. Last year alone saw record sales of $936 billion.
With consumers looking to spend, you need to get your offers in front of them. So feel free to increase your send frequency. If you typically send once a week, try increasing that to 2x or 3x. The key is making sure you send a relevant offer to the right audience (more on this in a minute).
Anytime you increase the number of emails you send your audience it’s important to keep on eye on your data.
Your audience will tell you, through the numbers, if you’re over-emailing.
You want to make sure your unsubscribe rate and complaints don’t increase. If they do increase your audience may be indirectly telling you that you’re sending too many emails.
Also monitor your opens and clicks, if this data is in line with your previous emails, then your audience is welcoming the additional emails.
Which segments do I want to send this to?
If you’re going to increase the number of emails you send, then you absolutely need to be segmenting your list.
Why? Because a properly targeted
email can help you increase revenue by 200%.
Here
are the best ways you could be segmenting your audience:
1 - Opens
Let’s start with the obvious one - if people on your list haven’t opened an email from you in the last 6 months - DO NOT send them additional emails.
Sending more emails to an
unengaged audience is asking them to mark your emails as spam. So just don’t risk it.
Really, at the 6 month mark you should be thinking about ways to re-engage (here’s some re-engagement ideas) these non-openers.
2 - Purchase history
This is one of the most effective ways to segment. Try segmenting subscribers based on purchase history.
By segmenting based on the products your customers have purchased, you’re able to tailor your content and offer to something you know they are interested in.
3 - Interests
You can segment (here’s how to create a segment) based on your audience’s interests.
So how do you know what they’re interested in? Good question. There are actually a couple of ways you can determine this.
- If you’ve surveyed them in the past, their responses can help you figure out what they may be interested in
- You can also determine interest based on how they’ve
interacted with your emails. For example if you click on one of the links in this email on segmentations, I can assume that you want to learn more about this segment and create a segment on segmentation.
- Here are some other ways you can segment your emails.
Will there be a special offer?
People are looking for
deals. They’ve been trained to expect it this time of year. Companies know that holiday promotions are a great way to boost their sales.
So if you’re not offering something special, you can be sure your
competitors are.
As you’re filling in your email calendar, be sure to include any special promotions.
Here’s an idea that I used at another company.
I would promote a product for $0.99, that regularly sold for $6.95. We would call this a “loss leader”, meaning we wouldn’t make any money on the product but it was at a price point consumers couldn’t pass up. Sometimes the biggest hurdle is getting people to put that first item in their cart, a low priced product helps with that.
In addition to the loss leader, we made shipping free over $35. That helped ensure they were buying more than one product.
More than just products
You don’t need to just sell products to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.
Just like this newsletter, you can create content geared towards helping your audience during the holiday season.
