Seasonal campaigns connect with your readers’ lives all year round with perfect sales messaging. Back-to-school reminders, holiday greetings, and Black Friday promotions are all opportunities to generate chatter at the right time. Timely, considerate seasonal campaigns cut through the clutter and engage readers at a wholly different level of engagement. But of course, such grand campaigns would otherwise be for naught without proper email deliverability, or worse, not getting to the intended recipients. Email warmup tools at Warmy.io ensure the proper email deliverability your seasonal campaigns require to generate even more success.
Planning Ahead for Seasonal Email Campaigns
Successful seasonal email campaigns foster a sense of what is coming and what the target market hopes to accomplish, and follow through with a cohesive plan. Does your campaign fit the season? The goal is to foster a seasonal relevance to your company and niche. For instance, a retail company will likely create expected email blasts for Black Friday or December holiday shopping sales, while the educational field would welcome back-to-school or end-of-year/semester messages. Ensure you take advantage of the seasons that inherently apply to your business. After determining your seasonal offerings, you’ll want to develop a campaign calendar. This makes email sends, graphics, and copy creation much easier when there’s no rushed, last-minute deadline.
For example, a holiday campaign could have a teaser email sent at the beginning of December to set the tone and then a few select emails on select days for select offers or select products. Finally, that last week before Christmas, an email can go out with urgency to purchase those last-minute stocking stuffers or other small gift options. A campaign calendar maintains the integrity of your seasonal endeavors and makes sure it’s done in time.
Seasonal campaigns rely on time-sensitive deals, so you’re tasked with making people feel pressured. Use subject lines and CTAs that require instant action “Sale Closes Tomorrow!” “Last Chance to Save!” or include countdown timers in the email that push people to feel that they must act immediately. You can even use your segmentation efforts to offer different types of seasonal sales to different segments, early access for loyal customers, additional discounts for brand-new subscribers.
Scheduled content not only provides timely delivery, but also the capability of testing when delivered in advance. By pre-scheduling to A/B test subject lines, graphics, or CTAs, you’ll understand what’s best for your audience by the time the real email needs to go out. Furthermore, testing is encouraged to discover what your audience engages with so that real engagement and conversions are optimized when the real campaign comes to fruition. Furthermore, you gain assets through planning. For example, if your project is completed on the fly, you may not realize whether you need additional assets due to increased traffic on the website or whether you may need a backstock inventory to facilitate new orders.
When you have everything you need and when thanks to good planning at good timing for a seasonal endeavor it’s easy to have assets ready to avoid on-the-fly snafus during the actual execution. Instead, it goes out ready truthful teases of success and excitement of future endeavors. Thus, to do it right for effective seasonal email campaigns requires planning.
Crafting Compelling Seasonal Content
The email copy, email design, subject lines, body of the email, seasonal and otherwise enticing comes from a meticulous, appropriate, and creative application. Seasonal capitalizes on the buzz and emotion of the natural year, and from a reader’s perspective, this all has to be flawlessly executed. Secondly, incorporate seasonal imagery, colors, and themes into your correspondence. Much like that of a magazine, images can engage on a higher level and evoke a sensation before someone even delves into the text. For example, a seasonal email can incorporate the imagery of holly leaves or snowflakes in the backdrop, a red and green or orange and yellow color palette, or photos of Christmas trees and Halloween pumpkins.
A back-to-school email can show images of books, pencils, college students, or children on the playground. Such images not only represent what’s going on in the world at that time but also elicit an emotional connection to your subject and respect the efforts from the email. Furthermore, don’t forget about your seasonal campaigns – inbox subject lines pertaining to the email content are more likely to get the recipient to open and engage with your messaging. Think “Holiday Discounts,” “End of Year Sales,” “Last Chance for Holiday Shipping” – or “Back-to-School Starts Now!” for your in-the-moment campaign. Also, take advantage of holiday emojis – in your birthday discount campaigns, use the 🎉 emoji in the subject line, use the 🎂 emoji for the birthday campaign or the 🎒 emoji if this is your back-to-school email. Emojis help subject lines pop within an overcrowded inbox.
Make sure your email’s seasonality is relevant to the reader. If you’re doing a sale, talk about seasonal specials, seasonal savings, or inventory that’s only available during that time. A summer clothing store should advertise its winter holiday sweaters as a limited-time offer; a travel agent should push his December vacations as limited-time opportunities. Seasonally relevant CTAs like “get it while you can” or “reserve your experience today!” compel people to act so they aren’t left missing out on something that could usually be there. Another method of adding meaning to your seasonal message is personalization. Utilize customer data to craft a message that better fits their intentions.
For example, if someone just bought a brand new winter coat, send them a holiday card with suggestions for accessories to create a warm-weather ensemble. In addition, if you have a holiday promotion related to winter activities, send it to customers from specific areas where you would know cold-weather activities occur, and they would be more susceptible to appreciating your offer. And finally, don’t forget the story behind your seasonal emails. Whether it’s your story, a customer’s story, or even something accrued on the back end and used in application seasonally, make it work. For example, the seasonal cookie from a bakery is the family recipe everyone makes during the holidays, and it’s been featured for decades.
A workout clothing brand profiles a long-time customer who used their gear last year to get in shape. These stories create transparency and help create a connection between you and your reader. Your emails will grab attention and hold it in a way that meaningfully engages with seasonal content that’s eye-catching, useful, and impactful. Content that is seasonal and does the trick does not merely apply to the season in which it does; it’s an acknowledgment of it for your customer who is in it for the long game.
Why Email Deliverability Matters for Seasonal Campaigns
A seasonal campaign literally means it operates within a limited timeframe. You’re doomed if you’re not getting your emails to the inbox at the proper time. Poor email deliverability – ending up in spam, coming at the wrong times to generate the appropriate hype to engage – destroys your campaign. But good email deliverability is crucial because when people are most engaged like on Black Friday there’s an even shorter time they have to act upon it. Email warmup services ensure deliverability.
For example, with an email warmup service like Warmy.io, it makes sender reputation easier because the service creates engagement opportunities to make email clients aware that you are a legitimate sender. Furthermore, email warmup minimizes chances of being marked as spam, with the increased potential of your emails getting to client inboxes when they need them.
Email warmup means that if you have a seasonal business campaign, when the campaign comes around, all systems will be in place for maximum effectiveness. By the time your busy season comes around, Warmy.io will have established its aspects of sender reputation so you can have seasonal campaigns with ease, every time.
Conclusion
Seasonal email marketing is an effortless tactic to not only engage an audience but create buzz and simple conversion. There is so much integration into the content creation process for timely appeal and CTAs that demand urgent action. Taking advantage of seasonal marketing opportunities is a breeze. However, without proper deliverability, many of these opportunities go unseen.
Warmy.io is the email warmup solution that gives businesses peace of mind that their emails will be delivered to the inbox and not the junk folder, ensuring proper business communications arrive where they need to be at the proper time. Thus, with proper warmup, excellent content, and email deliverability, seasonal email marketing becomes an essential part of any business’s approach to garner engagement and ROI, no matter the season.
