Focus on Email Marketing in June for success in December

While it might seem strange to be thinking about December and the holiday shopping season at the beginning of summer, you need to be if you want to maximize your success during the biggest shopping time of the year. Top web development companies know that you need to focus on email marketing in June for success in December. By taking that time now, you will be able to increase both engagement and demand ahead of your competition and that can pay big dividends at the end of the year.

“The early bird catches the worm,” ~English proverb.

If your businesses are heavily reliant on any peak period for the overall success during your calendar year, then it is important that you plan early to maximize sales and ROI. While the focus of today’s article is on holiday shopping, realistically these concepts can be applied for any business wanting to get a jump on a peak period using emailing marketing.

Planning Ahead with Email Marketing

These concepts can help take your next campaign to the next level:

• Utilize Personalization – Personalization is a powerful concept in marketing and has proven to be very effective at increasing email opens and responses. Using tailored messages can help interest or entice readers into opening and engaging which means using customized subject lines, greetings, relating current offers to prior purchases as well as providing suggestions based on their profile. Personalization also helps a brand stand out from the competition.
• Build Lists Early – Early is always better than late, especially when it comes to your email list. By starting early you have plenty of time to audit your entire list, removing both the inactive subscribers and those who might appear fictitious. Next, update purchase history and other related information so that your database is current. Now you are ready to explore a new subscriber campaign with marketing to build the list as well as working on a re-engagement campaign to start baiting the hook. With both campaigns, you will also learn what types of content are currently effective along with topics that might resonate better with your audience. Finally, you can consider launching a campaign in a month or two to build excitement for soon to be released products or hint about the future.
• Use a Multichannel Approach – Now more than ever a multichannel approach needs to be employed. The variety of social platforms means you have more ways to connect with customers. You can use some of the same email techniques with social media posts along with using social media as part of your new subscriber campaign. A key point is to use consistent messaging with email, social, and any other channels. You can also consider using integrated landing pages across all channels for better synchronicity.
• Add Social Proof – We have discussed the value of using Social Proof for obtaining more sales and that concept is also effective with email marketing. Using testimonials and reviews can provide a way to reduce cart abandonment and add legitimacy.
• Include Video Content – Video content is a very popular and powerful medium, so it makes sense to incorporate it into an email campaign. Video can be much more engaging than text plus it is easily digestible especially on mobile platforms.
• Don’t Forget to Test – Testing is an important part of the whole process because it allows you to compare the effectiveness of virtually anything, from subject lines to which image works best, with a focus group that aligns with your target users. If testing can provide even a 2% increase on your ROI then it is well worth doing it.

Mistakes to Avoid

Typically an email marketing campaign involves a good amount of time and energy so it makes sense that you want to avoid shooting yourself in the foot if possible. These are some of the more common mistakes we see being made with campaigns that you should definitely avoid:

• Lack of Clear Goals – Every marketing campaign needs to have clear goals. What is it that you are trying to accomplish? Without clear goals, it is impossible to determine the success of your actions. For example, if you are sending out emails to increase site traffic, what is your goal of opens and then visits? With clear goals, it makes it much easier to formulate plans, review analytics and ultimately understand if your campaign did what you wanted it to do.
• Forgetting to Entice – The majority of businesses don’t have an eager email list that will open and pounce on every offer they receive. That means before you launch an important campaign, time should be spent baiting the hook or warming up the audience. For those who have low open rates, using giveaways or other promotions might be in order to increase rates. You also need to understand what customers want, need, or are looking. Surveys are a great way to learn more about your list so that you are in a better position to provide enticement.
• Not Being Mobile Friendly – Honestly, if your emails are not optimized for mobile viewing then you are missing out on business. More than likely you yourself have read plenty of emails on a mobile device and those which aren’t optimized can be very hard to read which typically means getting ignored or deleted. All emails need to be mobile-friendly from subject lines to content to where they are sent if they click a CTA Many mobile email boxes display limited amounts of characters so if you regularly go over 50 they might be missing the attention grabbers you are using.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that email marketing is a very powerful tool when done the right way. By focusing on email marketing in June for success in December you are getting ahead of the competition without facing the pressure and rush as the year draws to a close. That extra time is critical for your campaign as you will be able to follow the tips we have provided while also avoid mistakes to get the best results possible.

Be sure to check back every week for great new Lounge Lizard blog articles.