If you’ve not yet planned out your year-end email campaigns, now is the time to get to it! No matter what you might hear from the social media gurus, email is still one of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal, with the best ROI that outperforms even organic search (SEO). Harness email’s ability to yield maximum conversion with these pointers:
Plan your publishing schedule for impact
Your subscribers will likely receive hundreds of marketing emails at this time. Make sure yours offer relevant value and are sent at the appropriate time. Unless you know your audience inside-out and their lives are different, plan for a chunk of your customers to be in frantic work wrap-up mode right up until the school holidays start, and then mostly offline or travelling from then. Another large group of people will work up until the Reconciliation Day public holiday, after which many businesses will shut shop for the year. Entrepreneurs may be working intermittently all the way through even from the road. You’ll need to know your audience and your product to make the call on whether its likely that orders for courier will still be made closer to Christmas, however ‘last chance for orders’ emails will often hook those who’ve left it too late to organise anything else. Think of ways to make it a no-brainer for them to buy from you, for example offering a wrapping service or hand-written cards so that gift orders can be delivered direct to the recipient or picked up while the giver is travelling to their holiday destination.
Your campaign schedule could look something like this, but remember it’s always based on knowledge of your customer profile:
- Festive Season gift guide (with a teaser if you’re planning to run specials)
- Email asking customers to vote on what they’d prefer in terms of specials/discounts/free shipping etc
- Special if you’re running one – taking the above results into account
- Refer a friend and win/each get a discount
- Reminder of gift guide with specials/discounts
- Before-you-go-on-school-holiday email (in time for order processing and courier delivery)
- Reminder of specials / gift guide, mentioning last order dates
- Pre-Reconciliation Day campaign (send in time for order processing and courier delivery)
- Countdown to last orders for delivery date with specials/free shipping etc.
- Reminder of specials / gift guide, mentioning last order dates
- Countdown to last orders for collection
- 1st Final day to order email, with specials/free shipping etc.
- 2nd Final day to order email, with Year-end wishes
Don’t be afraid of sending many emails, unsubscribes are likely to mean they’ve decided they won’t buy anyway. Don’t forget to also promote your social media channels if this is where you typically generate the most sales, and track your click-throughs.
Design your content well
Prioritise subject lines and give a lot of thought to what will be engaging and accurately reflect the value delivered inside the email. (47% of all emails are opened because of the subject line alone). Keep them short and interesting. Think in terms of savings of time or money, or emotional value, or status. As usual, refer to what you know about your audience. Use of emojis or puns work for certain markets, and if you can personalise the subject line this often helps with open rates, and sales. An Experian study found that personalised emails convert 6 times higher. Getting your emails opened in the first place is of course the first hurdle! Expect these to be low. For a new email marketer a 20% open rate might seem like a blow but that’s actually an impressive stat. If you’re getting high open rates but low conversions, perhaps your product offer or the wording or content within the email is not up to scratch. Keep tweaking and testing.
Make sure the fonts, colours and image styles are visually similar from your emails to your website. Consistency builds trust and helps to establish expectations. Don’t try to be fancy by changing template layouts from one campaign to the next and don’t waste time trying to find animations or colours that ‘stand out’. Besides, moving images are distracting. Religiously sticking to your brand style lightens the cognitive load on your readers as they recognise your aesthetic, giving their overworked minds one less decision to filter as they trawl through emails. Focus on delivering value and don’t be tempted to follow unrelated trends. Note that not all fonts will be installed on your recipient’s device, so use a web-safe font available in your email template designer that looks similar to the one on your website, otherwise it could be substituted with a font that clashes with your branding. Most US studies show that revenue per email on mobile devices is 4X higher than desktop, but this will depend on your market. Prioritise the design of your emails based on this information (all bulk mail providers will show you what your layout looks like on a range of devices).
Use copy that converts. Again this will be based on your client knowledge, but less is definitely more. People will be skimming, so keep it punchy and to the point, and use headlines and bold text tastefully to get your offer value across quickly. Even your button copy should be well thought out – for example, consider whether BUY NOW or SAVE NOW would be better. Always keep tracking click-throughs and testing and adjusting to optimise your conversions.
Call to actions (CTAs) – for example ‘buy now’ or ‘contact us’ buttons/links – placed just under a header image or headline shows marked increases in click through rates. The higher the contrast between a CTA link and the rest of your brand colours or shades, the more actionable it will appear. Gone are the days of using red or yellow flashes to draw attention (unless one of those stylishly contrasts with your core palette). Recipients are sophisticated, you don’t want to make your brand look cheap, and besides, their attention is already on their inbox as they read their emails so don’t go the billboard-in-Times-Square route.
Get the details right. Your customers are as busy as you are. Make sure your links direct to exactly the right product or landing page – don’t waste their time by sending them to a generic home page where they have to search through your stock. You’ll get high bounce rates for this annoying oversight. It should go without saying, but use a real reply-to email address! Even better if the address is for a dedicated salesperson.
Segment, track and test
Manage your lists well and segment as far as possible so you can track what kinds of offers convert for each kind of subscriber. The bulk mail service that you choose will have tutorials on how to do this. Segmentation provides positive outcomes in terms of open rates, leads and sales. Segments could be in terms of:
- The kind of jewellery they’re likely to buy
- Where they are geographically based (perhaps more likely to respond to courier discounts or free shipping, or in-store promotions if you’re a retailer)
- Recipients who only/more likely purchase when a % discount is offered
- Recipients who only/more likely purchase when a Rand value discount is offered
- Recipients who only/more likely purchase when a buy-one-get-one (BOGO) deal is offered
- Recipients who purchase around holidays or occasions, like Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day
Extra information can be gleaned by simple follow-up sequences (automated or manual, depending on your time and budget) that ask why the jewellery was purchased. You can also use this to survey your customers about any other marketing, sales or branding data (keep it brief) that you may need clarity on. Offering a surprise discount voucher on their next purchase is a great way to surprise and delight customers, and increase your chances of future sales.
Utilise the power of automation. From welcome emails on signup to abandoned cart reminders, get your email software working for you. Research shows consistently that sales are made in the follow-ups. Emails that are triggered to send to a recipient following a certain action on their part (for example a click, or no action taken) can generate up to 5x higher open rates and 15x higher click-through rates, and can be responsible for as much as 20% of email marketing revenue!
No email list yet? There are plenty of free bulk email providers so don’t let budget get in your way of utilising this crucial tool. If you’re storing past client information, you’re already subject to POPIA. Make sure your first email campaign welcomes the recipient to your list, tell them that they’re receiving it because they’re a past client, let them know what to expect from it and make sure your unsubscribe button is working. Existing customers who know what to expect from you are substantially more likely to buy from you than ‘cold’ subscribers from a signup form (although you should definitely also have one on your website!).
See more tips and advice in our past Festive Season marketing article. Hoping this Season is your best yet!
