With Cyber Monday right around the corner, it’s a great time for some helpful tips from the TargetBay team. Let’s begin with a reminder! World-renowned enterprises such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc, who are already spearheading the email services sector—are already gearing up for the influx of traffic that they are going to receive. Proceeding on this track, perceptive marketers are positioning their marketing campaigns to ensure that their emails hit the recipients’ inbox.
Now, moving further along your goal of creating a Cyber Monday email campaign, the first thing you must do is to plan ahead. The early bird gets the worm. The sooner you start, the better. This way you can reach more people, and since you act early, you will have a natural upper hand over your competition. Moreover, you’ll have enough time to plan your holiday email campaign, articulate every word, and get the word across.
Maintain a Clean Email List
If you already have a strategy in place to capture email leads with pop-ups or other forms of email capture, then well done! But, it’s not the job done.
As you get more and more subscribers on board, however, you’ll find that certain subscribers will stop engaging with the brand emails, and your open rate drops. Another possibility: Some users will mistype their email address when signing up, while some others will ignore your messages entirely. While these are very usual scenarios in email marketing, addressing this issue for a long time will sabotage your email deliverability. The last thing any marketer wants is their Cyber Monday email landing in the spam folder. This is why it’s crucial to clean your email list, and the end-of-year sales period is the perfect time to do so.
To begin with, cleaning your list, you need to segment the subscribers who haven’t opened a single email from you over the last, for instance, 3 months. As you identify the inactive customers in your email list, you can either remove them or try to win them back by creating a separate email campaign for them.
Integrate Your Email and Social Media Marketing
As someone who spends a decent amount of time reading and developing market-centered content, I’ve never been skeptical about the true power of social media. But, you know what’s even better? Combining your email and social media efforts to promote your multi-channel marketing capabilities. Getting your audience to your social channels is a great way to nurture your customers to become brand advocates. I guess an example Cyber Monday email template would better represent what I am trying to accomplish verbally.
Here’s one way to do it. Promote your hashtag along with the real pictures of your customers from Facebook or Instagram. However, you must have the consent of the users before you use their social media assets for promotion.
Go Beyond the Design Norm
One of these days I expect marketers to understand the importance of a good email design. Although everybody is so focused on content quality and relevance, the lack of a good design would affect the way it’s presented. And guess what! A good email sales pitch is not merely about copy, it’s also about how it’s delivered and perceived by the recipients. That being said, every once in a while, it doesn’t hurt to think out of the box. In fact, your customers might get excited about the sense of novelty you try to bring forth.
We have sent out a Cyber Monday email that’s very simple and minimalistic. Instead of having a traditional, bulky column layout, we decided to arrange all the content and images into the first fold. The decision to ditch conventional design thinking is not just about improved CTR but challenging the customers’ old convictions about the brand.
Offer Gift Cards
You might probably hear a lot about offering gift guides, however, the problem with the idea is that some of your recipients might not have the time or patience to look through them or they might not be sure about the preferences of the person to whom they are planning to gift it to. Gift cards, on the other hand, are easy, plus you are giving someone the freedom of choice—the greatest gift of all. The best part: Cyber Monday is the perfect occasion to take advantage of gift cards, and emails are the best way to deliver it.
On a special note, gift cards work better on customers who almost convert. For instance, segment people into who have already opened your email, and who have not, and send emails with gift cards to those who haven’t opened your first email.
Create a Referral Program
Marketers rate referrals as the 2nd-highest source of quality leads. Also, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association reports that approximately 2.4 billion brand-related conversations are happening every day in the United States. People often talk about the products and services they love, and that’s how words get around. If you don’t know, now you know; that word of mouth is one of the best and effective forms of marketing. Send out email messages to customers who have shopped with you in the past and incentivize them for referring a friend.
Possibilities are limitless when it comes to building a referral system. You can merge them to your holiday marketing campaign by offering free giveaways to everyone who refers your product/service to their friends, also to anyone they get to sign up or make a purchase.
Promote Your Limited Time Sale
Some words have the power to grab the attention of customers. Using terms such as “Shop now”, “Only for today”, “limited time offer” or any variation of those words, will trigger an instant buying instinct in shoppers. In sum, creating urgency works. It leaves customers with no choice but to take action, if not, they will miss their one chance to grab the best deal they can get. Believe it or not, this simple trick can significantly improve your click-throughs and sales.
In general, we humans are prone to mulling things over. Customers, especially love to debate their options, weigh the pros and cons, and make an informed decision. But, marketers are often impatient. And there’s a reason for it: a delayed conversion is sometimes a lost conversion. That’s why injecting a sense of urgency in your emails is relevant.
Follow Up With Cart Abandoners
If you think Cyber Monday isn’t an appropriate occasion to address cart abandonment, you are thoroughly mistaken. Cyber Monday is a hectic day, people often get tired of the luxury of choices they get in a limited period, and this may sometimes lead to shopping cart abandonment. The reasons may vary for each individual: maybe they found a better deal elsewhere, maybe your checkout process is too complicated, or maybe the customer is simply procrastinating. Anyway, whatever the reason might be, you can bring a percentage of these almost-lost shoppers back to your website—with abandoned cart emails.
Shopping cart abandonment is an obvious event when it comes to e-commerce businesses, and that’s why you need to keep track of it. By doing so, you will be able to direct their email address to a particular lead list. Further, you can schedule periodic reminders targeting them. Now, don’t let this opportunity pass you by, for 60% of people who received abandoned cart emails completed their purchase within 24 hours.
Send Post-holiday Deals
While holidays present great conversion opportunities, post-holiday deals allow you to nab a few more sales or get shoppers who received gift cards to start using them.
Get Started On Your Cyber Monday Email Campaign
Now that you have a plan, it’s time to start composing your Cyber Monday emails. However, the holiday season is liked to be one of the busiest yet important moments for your brand. You might have a lot of work to do or maybe wouldn’t have enough resources to invest in email design. With our customizable Cyber Monday Email templates, there’s no need to start your email from scratch. Explore 400+ free templates featuring responsive designs and multipurpose layouts to nail this year’s holiday sale. Also, grab our free “Holiday Readiness Guide” for creating an email campaign your audience will want to engage with.
