3 E-mail Strategies That Inspire Holiday Cheer

The holiday season may be well upon us, but it’s not too late to add some cheer to your e-mail marketing program this season. Here are three ways to reach out, engage with your audience, and make their holidays shine.

1. Put an extra treat in their stocking
Most holiday e-mails are focused on e-commerce, but it doesn’t have to be all about sales. If you’re still selling by way of promotion rather than service, you’re missing an important opportunity to build your brand and long-term relationships with your subscribers.

In the spirit of the holiday season, focus your e-mail on both giving and receiving. What immediate, non-purchase-related value can you offer for free?

How about offering some helpful content with seasonal relevance such as recipes, shopping tips, or ideas for a new holiday tradition for the family. Or launch a holiday-themed sweepstakes or contest related to one of your exhibits. There’s no time like gift-giving season to award those big prizes.

2. Holiday time is story time
The holiday season is a perfect time to send a limited-time e-mail series. Think of a series as a way to tell a story. Just as good fiction follows an arc, so can your holiday e-mail series. Consider crafting your e-mail program to tell a story about your organization.

Easier to launch than an ongoing program (such as an e-newsletter), the limited-time series is palatable both to you and your subscribers...provided you don’t go overboard with frequency. Subscribers appreciate a limited-time e-mail series because it promises not to go on indefinitely. It’s also an opportunity to build a solid foundation with the many new subscribers or first-time visitors you’re sure to attract this time of year.

Remember to be clear about what your subscribers will be getting, when they’ll get it, and for how long. And, of course, make it easy for them to opt out.

3. Let them shop until they drop
More people are shopping online than ever before, and we can expect the trend to continue for years to come. So consider rewarding your site visitors and e-mail loyalists with channel-exclusive offers and special items they can’t get anywhere else.

You can go with the tried-and-true holiday season “countdown” approach (celebrating the 8 days of Hanukkah or 12 days of Christmas). Or maybe you launch a weekly gift-suggestion campaign that highlights unique, handmade gifts from your museum store, targeted to the people most of us buy for—parents one week, siblings and kids the next, friends the following week.

Use the prime real estate on your home page to promote online exclusives. And for the love of e-commerce, if your online store isn’t using abandoned-shopping-cart-triggered e-mails yet, start a program with a holiday-purchase discount tied to it.

Last but not least, remember that you can issue post-holiday rewards for holiday-period purchases and even do it at intervals throughout the year. This strategy prevents erosion of holiday sales margins while encouraging post-holiday sales during typically slow periods.

The holiday season will surely come and go, but why wait until the new year to connect and engage with your audience? Send holiday e-mails that resonate with your subscribers, fulfill their needs, and build on the relationships you’ve forged throughout the year.

Happy Holidays!