Last year, holiday spending topped a trillion dollars.
But getting a slice of the holiday spending pie isn’t a given. If your holiday email or SMS campaigns miss the mark and don’t grab your customer’s attention, they’ll look elsewhere.
In this piece, we’re going to run through 6 common mistakes marketers make when building and launching holiday campaigns—and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Failing to plan
Holiday campaign plans
Are the easiest marketing campaigns to plan for. They fall on the same date every year. Customers save and plan to spend money on them. And past holiday campaigns can give you insights and data to use.
But if you are a month away from a big holiday, like Christmas or BFCM, and you still don’t know which campaigns are launching on what dates—you haven’t planned enough.
You need to know every step your customers will take when they make a holiday purchase, and each holiday is different. While BFCM purchases 6 Holiday Email and SMS Mistakes may be a spur of the moment, customers will probably research Christmas gifts for weeks. On top of that, they’ll look closely at your shipping details to ensure their products arrive on time.
Source
All of this matters when building out a holiday marketing plan. Customers won’t forgive a brand if they purchase a product they’ve been pushing on Instagram the week leading up to Christmas, only for it to arrive three days after the holiday.
Once you know the customer’s holiday journey and their buying expectations, build a content calendar around it.
Plan early and plot every Tweet
blog post and email campaign on a calendar. Mistake #2: Sending campaigns at the wrong times
Your holiday campaign must hit your customers’ inboxes at the right time to succeed.
Unfortunately, many brands flood the zone during the holiday season with too much content like bulk emails sends and generic SMS deals. If they’re sent to the customer at the wrong time, they risk getting lost in the chaos of their customer’s inbox.
More than 333 billion emails are sent and received each day, but during holidays like Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, the number skyrockets. You are not the only brand trying to sell during the holidays, and you’ll need to send emails and SMS at the right time to get noticed in a customer’s inbox.
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The right time to send an email
Or SMS campaign depends on the holiday. People will shop for Black Friday sales on the day, while some customers skip Christmas sales and wait for bargains around Boxing Day and New Year.
When GoDaddy tracked the best time to send holiday emails based on customer data, the results were surprising:
Email clickthrough rates peaked around Thanksgiving, and customers clicked on emails 5% more in early November compared to October.
Clickthrough rate remained steady throughout November and December indicating customers were ready to bargain hunt and thinking about holiday 6 Holiday Email and SMS Mistakes purchases for over a month leading up to Christmas.
When customers shopped for Christmas, they did it early. Traffic peaked on December 1st and 2nd, up 25% over the rest of the month
Here’s a peek at what your Black Friday promotional flow could look like:
Send your holiday marketing campaigns
at the right time and catch your customers when they’re ready to spend. Better features. Better support. Better customer experience.
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Mistake #3: Not segmenting customer lists or personalizing messages
Customers don’t want emails or SMS sent to them that aren’t personalized or relevant to their holiday plans.
A common email and SMS mistake
for eCommerce brands around Christmas is to send out blast emails to every subscriber on their list with a bunch of sale items and coupons. In fact, 70% of millennials say irrelevant emails are frustrating. Customers don’t want generic product advertising resource recommendations, especially when they’ve purchased something from the brand in the past.
The reality is, the brand should make an effort to send relevant content to customers.
An overwhelming number of customers (91%!) say they’re more likely to buy from a brand that sends them personalized product recommendations and offers based on their taste and style. The importance of segmenting your holiday email and SMS campaigns can’t be overstated. And it can be done in a few different ways using:
Past buying behavior: Has the customer purchased something from you before? What did they buy? What was their average order? Do they normally recover an abandoned cart or need a discount code to entice them back?
Demographics
Are you targeting customers of a certain age or gender? Do certain products appeal to a specific demographic? Would it make sense to build out separate 6 Holiday Email and SMS Mistakes campaigns to target each demographic?
Holiday campaign engagement: Have they opened cm lists your email or liked a social media post about a certain campaign? Are they clicking on links to gift guides or coupons? Or have they stopped engaging with your campaign after so many days?
For example, if you’ve got a list of customers who purchased multiple gifts from your website last Christmas, target them with a VIP offer. Using a tool like Sendlane, you can send out an early marketing campaign and try to encourage them to shop for Christmas gifts with a coupon or product bundle offers. Just create a list for VIP buyers and decide how you want to segment them:
In the example above
Everyone on the list has purchased at least four items in the past. This makes it easier to target your offer towards their average order value. These customers spent big last Christmas, so a coupon for 25% off orders over $200 could entice them back to the checkout while locking in some early revenue leading up to the holidays.
