Holiday email marketing campaigns are a great way to drive some additional sales and revenue.
Like most good email campaigns, you have to begin by letting people know about what’s coming a little bit in advance. I like to mention that a discount or “sale” is taking place, and provide the specifics about when it will begin and end, along with what’s “special” about it; e.g., “50% off sale”, “Thanksgiving Sale”, “Anniversary Sale”, etc.
To be most effective, it’s important to give people a plausible “reason why” the sale is taking place. Around holidays, it is fairly easy to just use the holiday itself as the reason for the sale (and for limiting the sale’s time frame). You can use traditional holidays, or any other event that’s taking place. I’ve seen people use their birthday or their kid’s birthdays (when doing personal selling in some markets). The key is to use a believable reason for having the sale other than “we want to make some money.”
In addition to time-limiting the sale event, it helps to provide some “scarcity” – something extra that’s limited in quantity to the “first NN” number of buyers. Scarcity creates some additional buying pressure to act sooner. Of course, scarcity is a technique that applies primarily to selling to consumers – not businesses.
Having run holiday email campaigns for a number of years in several of my businesses, I can tell you that done correctly, they can bring in a lot of sales, so it’s well worth the time to develop and run the campaign, especially against your in-house and partner lists.
If you’re interested in seeing what should be included in a holiday email marketing campaign, have a look at these packaged holiday email campaigns.
Free Email Campaign ROI Calculator – One more thing you might find to be helpful. We just released an email marketing ROI Calculator that can be used to quickly calculate the likely profitability of a given email campaign.
To use the calculator, simply visit the email ROI calculator page and enter your email campaign’s parameters.
The calculator takes email open rate and click-through rate into consideration to determine the number of website visitors the campaign is likely to produce.
Then, it calculates the number of opt-in subscribers the landing page will acquire, along with the number of sales that will be made. It also supports campaigns that refer traffic directly to a sales page or product page (and do not use a landing page or squeeze page).
The campaign’s revenue, profits and ROI are calculated based on projected sales volume minus the costs of the email campaign.
I hope you find this email campaign calculator useful.
Happy selling!
Author: Rick Braddy is President and CEO of WinningWare, which provides software tools and services for product launches and online marketing. He blogs about those same interests in his award-winning Product Launch and Business Growth Blog.