Holiday Email Marketing Strategy 2023 – Are You Game?

If there’s one time of the year that gets people out of their houses and puts their shopping veins into top gear, it is hands down the holiday season. As sentiments of joy and merriment punctuate the air all around, people look to shower it tangibly upon their near and dear ones by way of extensive gifts.

And so, year after year, the holiday season witnesses astonishing retail sales numbers. Last year, they touched an astronomical $936.3 billion; yep, you read that right.

Now, if you want to pocket the lion’s share of this extravagant offering, you will have to employ the services of the most impactful communication channel out there- email; you probably guessed that, didn’t you?

This holiday season, if you wish to come up trumps, you must pore meticulously over your holiday email marketing strategies, ensuring that every single screw and bolt is in its rightful place.

Need help with chalking out an effective strategy? Well, you’re just at the right place! Today, we are going to discuss a handful of strategies that are sure to supercharge your holiday email marketing campaigns. Curious to find out? Read on!

Implement Hypersegmentation

With all brands vying aggressively for the attention of their target audience, email traffic during the holiday season reaches an absolute crescendo; there’s no escaping this fact.

When you view this in the context of widespread email fatigue that already grips all of us, you can perhaps imagine how Herculean of a task it can be to get your holiday email marketing campaigns noticed by your subscribers.

But, of course, there’s always that one surefire way of breaking through the clutter- personalization. And every email marketer knows that the first step to realizing personalization involves segmentation.

Dividing audiences into different segments based on a number of parameters such as age, gender, occupation, location, past purchases, browsing history, position in the sales funnel, and the like.

Through segmentation, you are able to obtain a comprehensive idea of all the diverse buyer personas interacting with your brand.

All that said, it is critical to keep in mind that the holiday season is nothing like the rest of the year. And so, applying regular segmentation to your holiday email marketing campaigns might not fetch you the expected results.

You see, consumer shopping behavior during this time undergoes a marked change. Instead of making purchases for themselves, people shop for others.

Now, what can you do to respond to this? Practice hypersegmentation- construct your segmentation framework on extremely specific parameters such as average order value, shopping behavior, purchase frequency, and cart profile.

Additionally, observe your customers’ shopping patterns closely to unearth new and impactful segmentation possibilities (for instance, studying past purchase histories to identify early shoppers and last-minute shoppers and targeting them accordingly).

With hypersegmentation, you stand a strong chance of leaving your competitors behind in the mad holiday season race.

Paint Your Emails in the Seasons’ Colors

Something that will surely get your subscribers paying attention to your holiday season emails is if they happen to be awash in colors that are synonymous with the occasion at hand.

Thanksgiving email? Color your palette orange. Christmas email? Pick your red and white brushes. I’m sure you get the drift?

When you do this, your subscriber instantly recognizes what the email is about the minute they open it, even without reading its contents!

Now, isn’t that nifty? Such kind of visual storytelling is important to earn your campaigns visibility amidst the holiday season rush.

Worried about deviating from your brand guidelines? Don’t sweat; it’s actually common practice for brands to shirk their own color palette for a bit and drape themselves in the shades of the season.

Take a look at these examples.

Leverage the merits of AI tools

If not in any other area, at least in the field of email copywriting, AI tools have proposed to make themselves plenty useful.

And if you have been looking for an opportunity to test out their capabilities, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better occasion than the holiday season!

Now, it is quite common for brands to announce a new slate of products exclusively for the holiday season. However, writing similar-sounding promotional emails for them all might prove to be a burdensome task.

Instead, consider relegating this activity to AI copywriting tools. Feed the tool a few of your previous promotional emails so that it is able to pick up your tone and brand language, be sure to specify a comprehensive brief, and watch it yield faithful, yet slightly modified versions of your other promotional emails.

A word of caution: don’t use the AI-generated outputs without first running them past the editor in your content team.

Keep in mind, that as things stand at present, AI tools are just proficient at writing first drafts. The responsibility of transforming these drafts into usable entities lies with human beings.

Assigning this fairly mundane task to AI tools will afford you the time to engage more fruitfully with other critical aspects of your holiday marketing campaigns, as well as keep up with the demands of this hectic period.

Tap into the Power of Videos

For subscribers to engage satisfactorily with your exclusive holiday season offerings, they’d first need to be bowled over by their appeal. And what’s a better way of showcasing the charm of your products than by crafting an exquisite promo video around it?

The merits of video marketing are no secret to anyone. So, don’t be shy of spending a little bit extra and ensuring a decent production value for your offerings’ promo video.

Stay assured that if your video has hit all the right notes, you’ll be more than compensated with the returns it will drive.

However, given that the video is a heavy visual component, take care to not include any other heavy-duty visual components in your promo video emailer.

Wrapping It Up

Designing and implementing an effective holiday email marketing campaign is, no doubt, a tall order. That said, if you play your cards right, you’ll be able to secure revenue like never before for your business. We hope the strategies shared above will help bolster your holiday email marketing efforts!