The holiday season seems to be arriving faster and faster every year. And that's why it's never too early to start planning, creating content, and developing a revenue strategy. This guide covers a variety of topics related to all holiday email campaigns to help make this season the best one yet.
This guide is divided into four sections:
- Planning and preparing your holiday campaigns.
- Creative advertising campaign ideas for the holiday season.
- Create labels for your holiday emails.
- Enabling email advertising for the holidays.
Let's dive in now!
1. Planning and preparation of holiday campaigns.
When thinking about the holiday season, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. All these emails. All promotions. All done! And this is in addition to all the activities outside your email marketing.
But fear not—your planning guide is here! We break down the preparation for the holiday campaign into four stages:
- Develop a strategy – Take note of everything you did last year, big victories, And everything that missed the mark. Then, on a separate sheet of paper, brainstorm all the things you would like to create this year.
- Map – Gather all your strategy notes and consider available time and resources. Here you will outline the number of campaigns, their timing and content. This ensures that you have time to create, submit, and manage all in the coming months.
- Create “Now it’s time to sit down and work out the content.” Create funnels and forms, add tags, and do as much prep work as possible now so you don't have to type out emails at midnight thirty on a winter's night.
- Test – Test, test and test again! The more you can test your content before you send it, the better you'll be able to handle any unexpected formatting or timing issues.
With FeedBlitz, you can send test emails directly from the editor, from the campaign summary page, or clone your mailing list (because you will have unlimited mailing lists!) to create a test list and only have yourself as a subscriber.
Read more about the above steps here: Holiday email campaigns made easyand be sure to download the Holiday Campaign Planner to help you through the mapping phase.
2. Creative ideas for pre-holiday campaigns.
Whether you're an email veteran or are sending holiday emails for the first time, figuring out what to send can be the hardest part. Below you'll find four ideas to help you get started with your planning and strategizing.
- Offer exclusivity. Your email list is a valuable list of readers, clients, and clients who have opted in to receive content from you, and the holiday season is a great time to remind them of this. Offer exclusivity to your list by sending a holiday gift, such as content labeled only for your subscribers. It might look like this:
– Something created specifically for them that will not be published on your website or social media and will only be offered for free via email.
– Early access to the new course in PDF format or by email.
– Some of the outdated content from your safe. - Master the art of countdown. You're already working on your holiday countdown, so why not send a series of countdown emails? Consider shorter pieces of content such as little surprises or treats, daily quotes/tips/questions, your favorite recipes or tricks, etc. to send these countdowns.
Essentially, you break up large, long emails into smaller, smaller pieces of content. This is great for recipes, hobbies, events and coupon bloggers. A few countdowns to consider:
— 10 days of “Fright Nights”
– 5 days of preparation for Thanksgiving
– 8 days of Hanukkah
– 12 days of Christmas - Organize a competition or collaboration. This is a space where your creativity can really grow, not only in the competitions you run, but also in the collaborations you work with. Consider a competition for the best pet costume among your audience. At a minimum, this could be one email calling for participation, one calling for votes for the first three to five projects submitted, and one announcing the winner. One idea = three different letters!
The holiday season opens the door to more creative endeavors, so if you're itching to expand your email inbox a little, this could be your opportunity to do so. Some ideas for competitions and collaborations might include:
— Costume competitions.
– Craft failed
— Holiday recipes
– Showdown scenery - Don't discount discounts and promotions. Sales are high during the holidays, and you can easily incorporate this into your holiday email strategy. In addition to offering standard discounts and special days on your site, consider what you can also offer through your email lists:
– Holiday pre-sale offers
– Reminders about your affiliate promotions and codes
– Subscriber-only discounts on special days (this also comes with an exclusivity offer!)
— Drawings for a gift card
These are just a few ideas to help you develop your holiday email marketing strategy. While you can send any of these types of campaigns throughout the year, they are useful to keep in mind when working specifically on holiday campaigns.
And if you're worried about inboxes getting full and your emails getting lost in the shuffle, take advantage of Inbox Activity Detection, a FeedBlitz Accel feature that lets you jump to the front of the inbox queue while your subscribers are checking their emails. Learn more about inbox activity detection.
3. Create labels for holiday emails.
FeedBlitz offers a variety of design solutions you can use when it comes to creating holiday email campaigns—and they're all sitting in the Visual Email Editor (VME) right now, waiting for you to use them.
Every FeedBlitz customer has a template library filled with ready-made email templates for most upcoming holidays. Simply scroll through your template library to the Holiday and Seasonal sections, choose a template to work with, add your logo or images, update your content, and you're done.
You can also search by keywords to see which templates are used for holidays, seasons, sales, and promotions.
There are a variety of content layouts with the ability to add/remove content blocks as needed. And if you're ready to boost your holiday income with ads this season, drag and drop your ad units—after enabling ads in your account settings—and let the system take care of everything. (We'll talk more about advertising in tomorrow's letter.)
And the design assistance doesn't end there. If you're interested in spicing up your images, remember that your VME image library has direct integrations with Unsplash, Pixabay, and Tenor, giving you access to millions of free images for commercial use!
Ready to take your holiday emails to the next level with free templates and images?
Start your free 30-day trial of FeedBlitz.
4. Advertising by email for the holidays.
Advertising revenues in the fourth quarter are often among the highest of the year.
Not only are many people in their inboxes checking email, but the advertising inventory is well stocked. Both of these factors present excellent opportunities to generate income from the emails you're already sending.
Learn more about everything related to advertising programs in this blog article: Your Guide to the FeedBlitz Advertising Program. In it, you'll find advertising examples from client emails, revenue from three clients in three different genres for 2021 and 2022, and some ways to improve your advertising practices to maximize revenue.
In this post, pay particular attention to the fourth quarter earnings of all three clients shown. Even if you're feeling unsure, the holiday season is a great time to test the waters, especially if you're already advertising on your site!
The advertising program is available to all FeedBlitz customers, and you can sign up in minutes. It will also not affect or jeopardize your current online advertising efforts.
Plan and prepare now to avoid added stress, confusion, and last-minute presentations.
When you think about year-end email campaigns, there's often a feeling of fear or confusion, but it doesn't have to be that way! As you can see, we are big fans of planning for future success and are happy to help provide you with resources and tools. Taking the first steps now sets the pace for you to win the inbox this holiday season.
Submit your holiday campaigns using FeedBlitz: Go to this page to start your free trial. Questions? Feel free to contact us with any questions through our Support page. Live support is available Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm ET, and you can always find helpful information 24/7 on related resources. Here.
