Christmas is coming is your business ready for the challenge of what should be the best time of the year if you’re a retailer. In some cases Christmas can be the make or break for a business, they need the surge in Christmas trading to make the real profit. With so much at stake for many retailers its no surprise to see many preparing well in advance (yes the M&S Christmas ad was shot in August) so these are our 6 top email marketing tips for Christmas.
Start Early – you don’t want to be starting your campaign at the last minute so get your plan sorted and start it now, sit down and work it out, think about it, people are likely to be buying wrapping paper earlier and sending to far flung corners of the world earlier, so can you campaigns evolve with these ideas?
Ensure you target the right audience for your campaign – we’ve talked previously about how if your data is properly segmented then you should be able to break down your audience to ensure you target the right group for each element of your campaign, so use this data and use it well.
Use your imagination – don’t just copy and paste last years, if you’ve had a review after Christmas look what worked well and what you could improve on, and then think big about how you can accomplish an even better result this year, for example think mobile, can you target campaigns for your mobile audience?
Plan your schedule – you need to have a plan, we talk about this a lot and that plan needs to take into account all aspects of your business, from taking orders to key calendar dates to actually despatching all your sales and then work your plan around this. Your customers will still expect the same high level of service, so if you get an order today it needs to be ready to go within 24 hrs and talking about despatch have you planned in those last order dates that you can guarantee delivery pre Christmas?
Ask for the sale – a common mistake we often see is not actually asking for the sale and this is even more important at Christmas as you get a very short time to get the order. So why not ask for the sale and make it really simple for a customer to place and order, if you require people to register beforehand could this be an option in this busy time of year?
Don’t just do it – And by this we mean don’t just do it for the sake of it, if you have a plan in place you should know what audience your aiming for and what you want to accomplish, so don’t just send something for the sake of it as this may cause more harm than good and you don’t want that!
So there you have it our top 6 tips for your Christmas email marketing, these can help your retail business on its way to Christmas sales glory….
Download our free email marketing brochure packed with all sorts of helpful info from our website here.
