15 Amazing Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Ideas: The COVID-19 spread has magically changed the business prospects for all genres and industries. Its economic impact is equally visible on the transformation of strategies of businesses to achieve the target holiday sales with high hopes – “May this festive season bring back the lifeline to their down-falling businesses.
We highly hope that this article – “10 Amazing Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Ideas,” will help you in perfectly building your holiday marketing campaign and support you in serving your customers during this Corona effect. We want your business to bloom again.
You should tighten your belt and pull up and your socks if you really want to stand out in this huge crowd of marketers and increase your sales during corona.
We all know, festivals are at the door, and people are wondering how to shop for their close ones with the continuous fear of corona spread. However, they still look to have a sweet solution.
So, in case you really aren’t in a mood to miss this golden chance to boost your revenue and sales, don’t wait any longer to plan your Holiday Season Marketing Campaign considering the safety norms for your customers.
Before sending any emails to your list, it is highly recommended to clean invalid email addresses from the mailing list. Make sure you use email verification tools to clean your mailing list.
Now, Shall we proceed?
15 Amazing Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Ideas
(1) Seasonal Google Ads Campaigns is the key to success
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A+)
No matter you’re in retail, insurance, B2B, or finance, Google Ads (earlier known as AdWords) is an amazing place to get seasonal! But how can you do this? Create a campaign and target holiday shoppers! Let’s explain further.
For example, if you’re involved in sell women’s apparel, you should target keywords like “gifts for mom” or “holiday sweaters.” After that, create specific landing pages and ads offering incentives to shop with your online store during this holiday season.
Perhaps you can provide free shipping in case they buy over $100 worth of clothing, or you can gift wrap for free? In case the gift is ordered before a given date, you can offer $20 off. Highlight these advantages and ensure your landing pages capture the true spirit of these holidays.
Not in B2C? Nothing to worry about! There are still several ways of getting a bit creative with your Google Ads campaigns in the course of these holidays.
As holiday shopping is on the way, everyone is searching for ways to cut costs. Hence, you need to promote a few special seasonal discounts on AdWords. Utilize ad extensions to take up bigger space in the search results, get a bigger chance of website visits, and highlight the “special stuff” your company is doing or offering for the season.
Looking for some quick Google Ads holiday marketing tips? Here you go;
- Use seasonal ad copy! Include phrases and words like “this season” and “holiday.”
- Highlight special offers and seasonal deals.
- Ad extensions are your buddies – Due to heavy competition, using Ad extension is “must” to grab spots in SERP during this competitive time.
- Instill a sense of urgency: “450% off if you order before Dec 18!” or “Reap benefit Before It gets Too Late!”
- Ensure you’re relevant – Consider conducting holiday-related keyword research.
- Set up ad scheduling and bid on the times with all smartness when your shoppers are searching.
The big consideration is that everyone is searching for a deal this holiday season! Pairing this with a feeling of urgency in your Google ad copy is a tremendous way to win over pathetic seasonal shoppers.
(2) Run a Holiday Giveaway on Social
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A+)
Talking about Instagram, another tremendous way to use the platform is by running a well-planned social holiday giveaway. We’d recommend running a social campaign throughout the major platforms your business uses (Snapchat, Twitter, FB, etc.) to attract more and more eyes.
And we as, who doesn’t like free stuff, most importantly during the holidays? Whether it be a huge discount, a free add-on or two with an order, or something completely for free, you need to get into the spirit of giving for this holiday. Typically, asking followers to share, like, comment, etc., are amazing tactics to get more engagement on your giveaway, and it really works, trust us!
(3) Give the Seasonal accent to your Emails
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A+)
If you’re running email marketing campaigns and not including the holidays into them, then you’re making a big mistake for sure! Holidays instill great memories into the shoppers’ minds, so enticing them with fun-filled seasonal emails is a sweet way to link in their inboxes.
For example, we came across a marketing email from Rent the Runway, which caught our eyes well. We may not specifically end up renting for Halloween, but it did remind us that we could use their service for the forth-coming wedding. that’s how it worked.
They said – “Channel for everything – It’s Halloween, Go for it!
Even you might be getting some seasonal emails, and nothing is wrong with cherishing (and even adopting) email subject lines. If you work smartly with your seasonal accent in your Email campaigns, it can certainly increase your conversions.
Well, do you know what magic is hidden in Instagram? We’ve explained it in our point #4, so keep reading!
(4) Give a hit to the Instagram Ads Game
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A)
Instagram is an awesome place to shine up your holiday game! Users are already posting their family selfies and photos of their decors, so why not break through it with a fun holiday ad? Posting organically to your account is awesome as well. However, to really stand out, it’s worth putting some money behind your perfect holiday pics.
No matter it is your office dog wearing a monster mask or your team dressed in ugly sweaters, get creative and cheery to bring in those Instagram hearts! Just take an example from a restaurant in our neighborhood. Not only did those folks get seasonal with an all drink recipe (pumpkin margarita, oh yeah!), but they placed it close to a carved pumpkin and used a few seasonal emojis in their ad copy.
We appreciate the way they did the whole thing! You can also be creative like that.
(5) Amp Up Your Remarketing Game
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A)
Memorize that time you almost bought that jacket, and then you saw that jacket again and considered that as a sign, and you went ahead to buy it? Sadly, that wasn’t fate. That was what we simply call – “remarketing”! Remarketing is to cookie your audience and later remind them what all they’re missing out on. It’s a technique, which you may already be using but not fully familiar with!
However, if you’re not already remarketing, then you need to be! Remarketing brings a great chance to remind potential customers that they left the landing page or their shopping cart. The holiday season is what we’d call a mandatory remarketing season as people are too busy and making decisions fast. Hence, if they dropped off your site or simply left their cart half empty, a quick reminder is all they might need.
This is exactly where remarketing comes into the game. While you configure your remarking lists for the upcoming holidays, make sure your membership duration is shorter than average. For example, if you generally allow users to be added to your list of remarking for 30 days, just reduce that to 11-15 days. That will certainly increase the chances of an individual viewing your ads more frequently closer to the holiday.
And make sure you’re remarketing on all the channels you’re advertising on (Google, Instagram, Bing, Facebook, etc.) if you really want to reap maximum benefit.
(6) Segment users as per your knowledge about them
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A+)
As a digital marketer, you and we, all of us, know that you’re sitting on mounds of user data that we can use to our benefit for future campaigns. However, the question is, are you really using this data to the fullest?
If not, then this holiday season is the best time to get crafty and creative with your segmentation messaging! Personalizing your messaging is a well-proven strategy to connect with customers on a very deep level. in case you’ve got a huge segment of moms that express interest in your services or products, create content that highlights how your business communes with how stressful the upcoming holidays can be with a house filled with kids. You can target a specific segment of leads with the same hobbies with ad copy matching those interests.
Use the data you’ve gathered through platforms like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, etc., and that’s a great way to start. Also, take the benefits of lookalike audiences on these platforms and go after a fresh segment of leads identical to a high converting audience. Oh yeah, it brings dollars!
(7) Gift Yourself with Some Shopping Campaigns
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A)
If you’re not using Google Shopping and selling physical products, then it’s the time to introduce yourself to your very first Google Shopping Campaign! These prove to be the perfect treat for your ultra-busy online holiday shoppers as they’re heavily convenient and can result in purchases happening almost immediately. That’s what you want, right?
Undoubtedly, the challenge is going to stand out next to your competition in a visual way, but as long as your campaign is set up properly and your images are enticing, these babies can actually work wonders when it comes to converting shoppers during this holiday season.
(8) Pull at the Heart Strings
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – B+)
When you picture the holidays, what do you see? You see Christmas lights, Santa Claus, reindeer, cookies, but what you feel is that warm feeling of enjoying time with your beloved family.
While holidays aren’t loved by all, the majority of people have an emotional attachment to them. And the fact is – emotions drive action, so now is the perfect time to add a pinch of emotions to your marketing.
By adding emotions, we don’t advise you to make every single of your audience members cry. Are you looking for some inspiration? Just check out Huffington Post’s article that features a few of 2016’s most amazing holiday ads.
(9) Conducting a Holiday Themed Webinar can be awesome
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – B+)
Is your company involved in a weekly, monthly, or quarterly webinar for prospects or customers? Webinars prove to be an amazing way to teach your audience in a highly personalized manner, which can lead to a natural sale in return.
However, webinars are common; we know that. We probably get about 25-50webinar invites in our company’s main inbox every month from numerous companies we’ve come across for 17 years, but the issue is those webinar invites may go unnoticed also. This is where holidays can highly help add a fun element to a normal webinar invite. You are free to get a bit funky here.
HubSpot highly adopts this strategy. They often take benefit of the festive season and promote seasonal webinars.
To make your webinar highly enticing, you can tempt your audience with a free gift, e.g., at the end of the webinar, you can offer all attendees free shipping on their next order or a holiday discount. Start thinking about it!
(10) Announce an unexpected Black Friday deal
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A)
In case your brand voice is happy-go-lucky, then this campaign is going to come off as uncanny or even rude. Flipping the coin, if your brand voice matches that of Cards Against Humanity, then you should definitely go for it!
Absorb inspiration from the core idea of the campaign—act the opposite of what your competitors are doing. For instance, when everyone’s busy sending out emails reading “Black Friday special—get 45% off”, you could practice sending something like “Black Friday who? Enjoy absolutely 0% off of your purchase!”.
55% is the average discount recorded worldwide on Black Friday. And on this major day of the year, customers expect nothing but heavy discounts.
So don’t you think there’s some better day to surprise your customers?
Asking for cash and giving absolutely nothing in return is certainly a tricky campaign to run. However, it works well if you’re a reputable brand, and it blends together with your brand voice as well as the holiday you’re promoting the campaign around. You might reap the great benefit with it… and gather $71,145 like Cards Against Humanity recently did!
Do you want a similar Black Friday encouragement for your store? Ensure it suits your brand first of all.
(11) Put a pinch of creativity in your video
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – B)
If you talk about the way to communicate a holiday message, then a video is the best way.
No matter it’s a festive webinar invite video you send through email, a video that you add to the customer page of your website to wish every single customer holiday cheer, or a quirky video you post on your social media (your CEO dressed as a Santa, or even a reindeer), get creative, and add fun with to and spread the cheer all around your marketing campaigns.
(12) Host a Themed Get-Together
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – B)
We all know that large gatherings aren’t encouraged this year. However, you can still spread holiday cheer. How? In the form of something like an open house or similar event. You can invite regular customers and thank them for their loyalty, and further help put the celebration right back into this holiday season.
You can make it a special “insiders” event, and that’s how you can make your customers feel like VIPs. How nice does that sound?
Further, you can offer free samples of whatever latest products you recently started to market or an event-driven promotion to sweeten the deal even more. This is also a wonderful opportunity to get feedback and recommendations from your customers regarding what they desire to see from you in the next year, and you can prepare your marketing plan accordingly!
Aren’t you sure about where to start? Thankfully, it’s so easy when it comes to the holidays. Throw together some red and green ribbons, winter-themed decorations, and you’re good to go!
At last, be sure to encourage your customers to click pictures and post to social media! We’d suggest a clever way to do that!
Just introduce an extra special holiday hashtag for the event, like#[businessname]VIP or just something that’s entirely holiday-themed. You can hire a pro photographer to take photos of guests as well as the event itself. This way, you can get ample material to spread throughout your social media platforms.
(13) Cyber Monday sale countdown
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – B+)
A few people can’t wait for the arrival of Cyber Monday (yes, even more than Christmas). This holiday scraped in 16 million shopping transactions in the year 2018 and surpassed Black Friday with 14.8 million. Now you know the importance of Cyber Monday?
Check out this amazing Cyber Monday email campaign Udemy that was sent out and cherish the ideas you can take for your own Cyber Monday shopping extravaganza.
Now, talking about grabbing someone’s attention, yellow is a nice choice. The scattered objects superbly illustrate that the sky’s the only limit for learning new skills.
The offer to shop $10 courses and the amazing color of the CTA button are both smart ways to lure in customers. Presenting your most affordable product or service is a nice strategy to catch the customer’s interest. The countdown can also be used to generate sales. In normal words, the digital timer creates a sense of emergency. The countdown pushes the customer to act while it isn’t too late.
In case the first part of the email fails to convince you—Udemy has placed a few of their courses right at the bottom, which can certainly spike the reader’s interest. You can adapt a similar approach.
Besides that, you can add the before and after sale prices and let your customers know how much they’re saving, and good customer ratings can also give an extra push.
(14) Disguise your marketing trick in a Christmas gift guide
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A)
Send your customers a Christmas gift guide to calm them down in their time of gift despair.
It’s a method to put your products in front of the customers perfectly, so they can buy and finally complete their Christmas shopping.
There are two sorts of email gift guides one can make—with products displayed and without them, just linking to the store.
If you want to offer an immediate product browsing experience, then the guide with displayed products works well. If you want to create some mystery and gather more clicks to your store, then you should create a gift guide without any products.
Just for an example, if you provide your customers with a little story well wrapped in a nice cartoon (something that triggers childhood memories), your email is going to be loved!
There’s much to add in an email, and you can actually hide your marketing gimmick very well here and still make the email so interesting.
You can link to your store with a CTA button reading “Shop gift guide,” and that will complete the message perfectly. A graphic email doesn’t need product showcases, still fulfills your wish as a seller.
Clear focus points, like we suggested the CTA button here, which doesn’t needlessly confuse the customer with several options. Just add two buttons —enter the store and close the email, and if you’ve done well, then we’re pretty sure that most of the customers will prefer tapping the first button and visit your store.
(15) Optimize Customer Retention Program
(Holiday Email Marketing Campaign Idea level – A)
The customer retention program supports your goal of increasing Customer Lifetime Value, including offers, loyalty programs, games, contests, etc., prove to be highly helpful.
Organizing contests and fun games highly enhance your engagement rate. Reward the winners with special and attractive prizes such as a sweet gift for her/him. Several traditional ways are there to woo customers, such as Spin The Wheel, Lucky Draws, etc. You can plan Contests and Games in many ways.
However, it’s essential to keep your customer knowledge updated regarding the same and draft the plans around at the right time.
Besides that, you can combine your contest and games with your loyalty program. Ultimately, offering loyalty reward points and discounts besides building trust will be highly appreciated by your customers.
As per stats, before buying anything online, customers, first of all, check on the discount offers and coupons. In the year 2018, over 135 million US online shoppers used digital coupons.
It’s expected to increase by 145.3 million by 2021. If buyers don’t find a relevant offer or coupon, they might go to your competitors. Having a well Optimize Customer Retention Program cuts off those chances!
