Saw an excellent post on managing subscriber expectations during the holidays today on the Email Responsibly blog.

The article includes an example HTML email used by Zappos.com, a hugely successful online shoe retailer.

A simple email explains when Zappos.com will begin their increased holiday email schedule. It also explains on which days the subscriber should expect to receive emails, and then reminds the subscriber to keep Zappos.com in mind for their gift purchasing needs.

Read more…

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Holiday email marketing campaigns are a great way to drive some additional sales and revenue.

Like most good email campaigns, you have to begin by letting people know about what’s coming a little bit in advance.  I like to mention that a discount or “sale” is taking place, and provide the specifics about when it will begin and end, along with what’s “special” about it; e.g., “50% off sale”, “Thanksgiving Sale”, “Anniversary Sale”, etc.

To be most effective, it’s important to give people a plausible “reason why” the sale is taking place.  Around holidays, it is fairly easy to just use the holiday itself as the reason for the sale (and for limiting the sale’s time frame).  You can use traditional holidays, or any other event that’s taking place.  I’ve seen people use their birthday or their kids birthdays (when doing personal selling in some markets).  The key is to use a believable reason for having the sale (other than “we want to make some money”).

In addition to time-limiting the sale event, it helps to provide some “scarcity” – something extra that’s limited in quantity to the “first NN” number of buyers.  Scarcity creates some additional buying pressure to act sooner and don’t put off the purchase.  Of course, scarcity is a technique that applies primarily to selling to consumers – not businesses.

Having run holiday email campaigns for a number of years in several of my businesses, I can tell you that done correctly they can bring in a lot of sales, so it’s well worth the time to develop and run the campaign, especially against your in-house and partner lists.

If you’re interested in seeing what should be included in a holiday email marketing campaign, have a look at these packaged holiday email campaigns.

Happy selling!

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