Ramp Up Your Holiday Emails

 Have you started planning your holiday season email campaigns yet? If not you better get started. Proper pre-planning helps to insure great results. Holiday emailing means more emails so you better make sure you are addressing the right segments in your lists with compelling messaging.

Here are a couple of ways segment your subscribers to help insure better results.

Segment by Subscriber Engagement. Segment your list to find subscribers groups who would respond to more messaging.  Divide your subscribers into three segment groups according to their activity on your list:

Actively engaged. These people are your best audience. They act on most of the messages you send: forwarding your newsletters, sharing your content on their social networks, clicking on your offers, and buying more often than other segments of your list.

Newbies. These people, although active when they first subscribe, tire quickly from excessive frequency or poor targeting. They might respond to every third or fourth e-mail if it catches their interest. Email subject lines and message content are critical.

Inactives. These people have stopped responding to your e-mails for one reason or another, but haven't bothered to unsubscribe.

Develop frequency strategies that reflect activity level:

Actively engaged are least likely to complain about frequency increases. Reward these most valuable customers for their loyalty and activity with special offers and incentives not available to other segments. Monitor this group for "subscriber fatigue" metrics (complaints, unsubscribes, reduced activity, etc.). These are the customers you must not lose.

Newbie subscribers might respond better to short-term opt-in programs that offer highly focused content, such as a deal of the day or gift suggestion offers. Promote these in your regular e-mails. State the terms clearly: starting and ending dates, frequency, content, and the ability to opt out at will.

Inactives lower your list ROI and waste e-mail resources. Shift the focus of e-mails targeted to this segment from holiday offers and incentives to "win back" incentives that can return them to active status or help them exit your list without generating spam complaints.

Additional Takeaways

Abandoned shopping cart campaigns. The subscriber exits your site without buying the items he placed in a shopping cart. This generates an e-mail gently reminding the customer to come back and buy the items. You might also promote items in the registered user's wish list. If a user has placed an item in the wish list and left it there for several weeks, consider dedicating an e-mail highlighting this item.

Review transactional messages.Your transactional messages may hold opportunities to increase cross-promotion and up-selling and drive traffic back to your site. Design the message to add a promotional feature below or to the side of the main message that can boost holiday traffic.

Upgrade your subscription forms. Frequency and permission go hand in hand when developing your mailing strategy. Your opt-in form must give subscribers clear choices to give them control and to help you collect the information you need to build relevancy and to create segments to control frequency.

 

Comments

[Steve]

Do Abandoned shopping cart campaigns fall under a commercial or transactional message?

This confuses me and worries that my company is not fully utilizing the capabilities here.