Creating Email Campaigns
Email marketing is a great way to reach your existing customer base with timely relevant information! Segment your email list and then develop a unique strategy to reach each audience so that you can achieve your top marketing goals.
Just like any other time of the year, during the holidays you should send targeted emails to subscribers with promotions and important purchase information. Obviously, you’ll want to include discount codes for things like Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, but you should also communicate to subscribers when the deadline is for getting items shipped in time for Christmas, what other customers are saying, what your return policy is, and so forth. Send emails that will engage readers and entice them to purchase.
Planning out your email campaigns in now helps you to determine what types of creative you’ll need and carefully craft your messaging, which is likely to result in greater success later. Take the time now to review the metrics for your previous campaigns so that you can use that data to hone in on what tends to work best with each of your audiences.
Updating Site Content
The last thing you want to be doing during the busy holiday rush is trying to update product descriptions, homepage text, FAQs, and other content that’s important to shoppers. Leaving this to the last minute is a recipe for the kind of stress and late nights at the office that’ll sap the enjoyment right out of your holiday season.
Don’t just assume that you can make do with what you have on your site now. The content that’s on your site acts as the best salesperson for shoppers you have, which means that it needs to be not only complete but also compelling. Tell people first why they should buy a particular product and then why they should do so from you. Unique content is crucial because people that are doing comparison shopping are likely going to see a lot of recycled product descriptions on other sites that simply use the stock manufacturer descriptions, so this is a great way to set yourself apart.
Setting Up PPC Campaigns
Building out your paid search campaigns is a HUGE time-saver during the holidays because you can write ads and generate keywords and just leave everything paused until you’re ready for it to go live. Then when you want to rev up your PPC, all it takes is a click of a button to launch. Or better yet, you can schedule your campaigns to turn on and off automatically so that you don’t even have to remember to do anything later!
Be sure to include holiday-themed keywords and ads, where appropriate, to attract people shopping for gifts. If you need tips on how to infuse your keyword list and ads with holiday appeal, check out this article on holiday PPC tips.
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!