10 How to Tips on Writing Holiday Ecommerce Emails That Ring in the Sales
It’s the holiday season and the busiest time of year for e-commerce retailers! This is the time of year where people are looking for unique gifts for family and friends — and maybe a little something for themselves too.And make no mistake, during the pandemic, online shopping has exploded!Consumers are fully embracing e-commerce this holiday season and have accelerated their adoption of convenient electronic purchases. With inexpensive shipping, competitive pricing, and a safe, quick shopping experience, e-commerce is projected to grow exponentially over the coming years.The big question — is your business ready to take advantage of the bigger appetite for buying products and services through e-commerce?
Engaging Your Audience Through Email Marketing Campaigns
With over 2 billion users worldwide, you have ample opportunity to showcase your brand, product, or service while finding your following and building loyalty. The key to ecommerce business today is engaging potential customers through social media so that you can entice them to follow you and share their email addresses.Without a doubt, building your email capabilities is near the top of the list for successful ecommerce marketing strategies and carries a huge return on investment for both B2B and B2C businesses.
10 Tips for Emails that Ring in the Sales
Time needed: 45 minutes. So you’ve built your customer lists and have a great product, but how do you write emails that get results? Read along to discover our top 10 tips for writing outstanding emails that take your online marketing to the next level.
- Generate Holiday Excitement in Your Email Subject Lines It’s a special time of year and when writing ecommerce emails during the holidays, you want to make sure you start your communication with a bang! Introducing…the email subject line. It’s the first thing people see and has to grab their attention so they will click on your email.This time of year, people are getting bombarded with marketing emails, so you want to get witty, festive, and exciting with your email subject lines. Capture attention! People want to be “Wowed” and to discover something that gets them hyped.A sense of urgency also works well in the email subject line, as do memorable puns. You should get creative with your email subject lines and always remember a “Call-to-Action”. Here are a couple of examples:Hurry! Open to see great holiday deals!Exploding Holiday Unicorns? See for yourself…What are you waiting for? Christmas?!?!?Ok, maybe exploding unicorns is a bit much, but you get the idea!
- Describe Your Products as Being the Perfect Gifts. During the holidays, people are always looking for that perfect gift. Framing your products as being THE extraordinary solution can help increase the chances that your potential customer will click through to your website.One effective way to frame your premier product is to feature some less-expensive items as great stocking stuffers. This allows your main product to shine in the eyes of the consumer.You can also market a high-ticket item as being the “perfect gift” for someone. If you’re in a specific niche market, let people know your products make fantastic gifts. If your product isn’t a traditional or obvious gift idea, it helps shift the customer’s perception that it would make a clever and sought-after present.Create a Sense of Urgency Time is of the essence! A sense of urgency ignites action in people and makes them respond more quickly.Creating a need to act quickly speaks to people’s fear of “missing out”. No one wants to miss out on something fantastic, but human nature dictates that people will often hold off until the last minute. It’s to your advantage to remind them how rare this opportunity is and then tell them they need to act fast.With the holidays fast approaching, you have a built-in clock — use it! Let people know that the clock is ticking and how much time they have to order an item to ensure it reaches them for the holidays. This type of call to action promotes customers to buy things right then and there.
- Segment and Personalize Emails People love to hear their own name – or see it in this case! Segmenting and personalizing emails will help you increase your sales conversion rates. One great way to do this is by creating multiple email campaigns based on your customers’ previous purchases.A personalized email that only shows products related to that particular customer’s specific purchases is much more effective than sending out one general email blast about everything you have on sale. If you have ever received an email from a retail giant, you know what we mean. It’s as if they read your mind — in fact they did!
- Encourage Your Customers to Make Wishlists. Ever since we were kids, we have been making holiday wishlists! It’s a great way to let others know what we’d like for the holidays.Instead of leaving it up to people to make these on their own — help them out! There can be a feature on your site that allows customers to create wishlists on the spot. Then, they can send that wishlist to friends and family or just keep it as a friendly reminder for the future.Having this feature on your site should be part of your overall ecommerce marketing strategy. Promote your wishlist feature in your holiday ecommerce emails and encourage people to send the link to anyone they want.
- Send Abandoned Cart Emails A surprising number of shoppers abandon their carts. In fact, over 60% of online shoppers put items in their cart, but don’t ever make it to checkout.That means you had prospective customers in the middle of buying something but didn’t actually go through with the purchase for some reason. An effective way to get some of those customers back to complete their purchase is to send out automated abandoned cart emails.Setting up an abandoned cart email is relatively simple. You can have an autoresponder campaign running that sends out emails after a certain amount of time has passed. This could be an hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, or some other specified amount of time — but since it’s the holidays, we recommend you make it quick.
- Send Order Confirmation Emails Order confirmation emails are like receipts. They not only build trust with customers but provide essential information on what was purchased when it can be expected, who to contact if there is a problem, as well as other important information.But why not include other pertinent information specific to that customer?They can be a terrific way to promote other products that are “featured” items that the customer may have been looking at earlier. You can set these up to show items that are similar to the ones purchased or on the wishlist. This is also a great place to include a discount or one-time offer that they can use at a later time.
- Keep Emails Short Make sure your emails are short and to the point. People don’t have the time or will to read long marketing emails. Throw in plenty of eye-catching graphics while providing essential information and be sure your emails are always written in an engaging and exciting way.Singularly important — always provide a call to action with a link to your site! Ask your customer- NO, tell your customer the next action they should take and what’s in it for them.
- Reward Loyal Customers Value your loyal customers above all else. People respond positively to being valued and appreciated!That’s why you should have an email list that goes out to your most loyal customers and sends them exclusive discounts and offers. You may even want to throw in a free gift with every purchase during the holidays to incentivize them to buy something. Or consider free shipping if feasible.
- Use A/B Testing A/B testing, or split testing, is important for any online marketing you do. It’s a great way to try out different email subject lines and email content to see which one has the highest open and click-through rate.
Wrapping Up
We hope our 10 tips on writing holiday ecommerce emails will give your holiday sales a big boost. Most of these are easy to apply, so get started on optimizing those holiday ecommerce emails and enjoying higher revenue during this most important time for businesses everywhere.Remember, every email campaign needs to ultimately lead people to your site. Once there, be sure you have relevant content that causes them to linger increasing your click through rate as well as customer dwell time!
Contact Lounge Lizard to learn more about ecommerce and digital email marketing campaigns.
