It’s September, which means it’s time to talk turkey about your email program. Q4 brings the most intense individual shopping period, including single largest online-shopping day (in Cyber Monday), and prolonged shopping season of the year from now until December.
So, yes, it’s a serious time for your brand, especially from an email perspective, and a number of you are already working through your email calendar, planning out promotions. Some of you are probably already done that calendar. And half of you are probably getting ready to launch your first holiday campaign during the first week of October.
All of that begs the question: How can your messages rise to the top of the stack when we’re all about the contribute heavily to inbox overload?
I think you start by getting smarter about who you’re talking to, and by measuring the impact of what you’re saying. The following are three email marketing tips that will have a real impact on helping you stand out. Even better, they’re focused on your customer and you can start using them now.
1. Make it Relevant
That means going a little further than adding your customers’ first names to your messages. Turn up your personalization game and target the messages, images, or calls-to-action based on the products or categories they recently viewed on your site.
With the traffic bump you are virtually guaranteed on an ecommerce site over the holiday season, take advantage of the fact that each time a customer visits, they’re likely interacting with a product or category. Changing your email message to reflect your customers’ most recent visits is a great way to show you’re considering their needs, rather than pushing a marketing agenda.
2. Make it Fun
With the holidays around the corner, it’s an easy time to go over the top with holiday themes and, let’s face it, a ton of discounts. But these aren’t the only way’s to capture attention. Unique and fun email campaigns can be highly sticky, encouraging your customers to re-open your email throughout the day.
Think about a guessing game or hourly deals promoted via email; for most of us, that would mean multiple sends to present the new content, and that would have customers running toward that unsubscribe button. But with real-time content, you can update the email body right when the customer opens it, turning those in-email games into a positive, lasting impression of your brand.
3. Make it Count
Given the pressure of the holiday season, it might be tough to think about testing. Your program needs to run smoothly, after all. The holiday shopping season, though, is a time that everything is working in your favor—the traffic, the consumer attention, the volume of sends. And think of the return!
If you don’t have time to segment your lists, consider using a smart routing approach. That way, you don’t have to do the manual work behind the segmentation and your customer is served the test or control email experience. That way, when you reach significance, its easy to roll out the winning email to 100% of your audience—without an additional send.
Dynamic content is gaining momentum, and is a new approach to updating your static emails, with minimal effort, and no additional sends. Monetate Engage helps marketers deliver on these principles by working with their email program to create real-time relevancy, with the added twist of dynamic content and personalization.
For more ideas on how to bring your static emails to life, download our Engage Lookbook.