10 Ways to Not Mess up Your Holiday Email Marketing Campaign

December is the perfect time for businesses to make that last push to increase their bottom line for the year. For those businesses still scrounging to get holiday emails out, here are the top 10 tips that will help your email marketing campaign increase revenue. For those who may already have their campaigns ready, these tips will show you how to improve your next campaign.

1. Use your brand name as the “from” address. Be proud of your brand, it should represent you. When people see it they should be excited.

2. Make your subject line intriguing. A subject line is the second thing a client will see. To avoid spam filters, try and stay away from words like “free” or “we are announcing.” Do, however, have special offers or deals. A good subject may solve a problem for customers. As an example, “Perfect gifts under $20″ is a solid subject line.

3. Have your content load quickly. Try to get your message understood in four seconds. The shorter the time it takes to load, the more time they have to understand your message. If you have a high load time, then you may want to think about simplifying your message.

4. Have your call to action be one of the first things they see. A call to action needs to take them to where they can purchase the item you are advertising with one click of a button. Make it simple for them. They cannot purchase anything through your email so you must take them to where they can make a purchase.

5. Send them exactly where you want them to go. Your call to action should take them to a page where they can complete your call to action. It should not take them to a large product page where they have to make additional choices. Consider McDonald’s shakes–they give you three choices to choose from including chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry. This helps you make a much quicker decision than choosing between the 31 flavors at Baskin Robins. While options may be nice, you are trying to help people make a quick decision.

6. Be sure to have only one call to action within the top section of the email. Have this call to action be the main point of the email. It is great that you have six different deals going on, but there should only be one that directly applies to them. If you want to list other deals, include a section in the bottom half of the email titled “Other Great Promotions” or something that fits with the style of your company.

7. Segment your email messaging. This means that you’ll have to create more than one email. The good news is that your marketing department probably already has different deals for the different segments of your market. Have your copywriting team create a unique message for each segment.

8. Use templates. You’ll cost your company a lot more money than you’ll bring in if you create an email that can only be used once. Setting up your emails with templates allows you to have 20 unique emails for each segment within hours. When you create the body of the email the way you want it and create a template, all you will have to worry about is changing the call to action, the short message, and the main images.

9. Send yourself test emails. This is especially important if you are dealing with templates. You never know when the person who created the email forgot to change a link. You want to make sure that you are sending your customers to the proper promotion. There is no point spending your time on your email efforts only to send 150,000 sports fans a link to children’s games.

10. Think about what your email looks like on smart phones, but don’t focus on it. The only email account I tend to check on my smart phone is my personal account and my work account. I have never given a company my main email address, I always give them one of three other email addresses that I only check when I want special offers or when I make purchases. Chances are that your email recipients may be doing the same thing. If this is the case, they are not seeing your email on their smart phones, they are looking at them on a laptop or home computer.

As a break from my tradition of learning from peoples successes, what mistakes have you seen in emails that you thought should have been avoided?

Tags: email marketing, holidays