Money Never Sleeps

Across the marketing universe, everyone’s prepping for the upcoming holiday season (yes, it really is just around the corner). Now’s the perfect time to do some fine tuning and cleaning up to ensure that you’re ready for the ROI rush. Grab a mop and let’s get started.

Clean Your List

Your email list took hard work to build, so take the time to give it the ol’ spit-and-polish whenever you get a chance. Cleaning your list starts by removing inactive subscribers and other eFAIL addresses (get it?!), but there’s a lot more you can do here.

• Make unsubscribing easy: It hurts, but sometimes people just drift apart. Instead of making it awkward for everyone, provide a clear unsubscribe button or link at the bottom of your email so that unengaged subscribers don’t have to ghost you.?
• Send re-engagement emails: Nothing brightens your day like reconnecting with an old friend whom you haven’t seen in a long time. Now, imagine this… with email (just in time for Black Friday, too).
• Segment your list: Segmentation is to email marketing what space suits are to astronauts – critical for survival. You can have the biggest list on the block, but if you’re not sending the right messaging to the right audience, you might as well be floating through the atmosphere paddling a kayak.

Update Your Flows

Quick recap – flows are those automated emails that get triggered during various points in the customer’s buying journey. Some essential flows include:

• Welcome Flow: Introducing a new subscriber to your business. This flow has the highest open rate, so you’ll want to put your best foot forward.
• Browse Abandon Flow: Enticing subscribers to come back and purchase a product they’ve been looking at. It’s super important to update this flow before the holiday season to ensure you’re capitalizing on sales.?
• Cart Abandonment Flow: Subscribers have items in their carts, now they just need to proceed to checkout. If you already have an idea for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Christmas, you can use this time to create specific cart abandonment flows for the occasion to highlight your special offers.
• Post-Purchase Flow: Here’s where you can ask your customer to review the product or service they’ve purchased, provide additional info they might need, and suggest similar items they might enjoy.

Here are few things you should look at while updating these flows:

• Ensure all pricing is accurate.
• Check that all imagery and product descriptions are up to date.
• Identify flows and touches with low engagement, then tweak their content, sending delays, and special offers (if applicable) to help improve performance.?
• Add touches to existing flows that you think could enhance your subscriber’s experience, like informative content about your products or services.

Tweak Your Calendar

Once the festive season is in full swing, you’ll have little time to pivot – especially when it comes to your email marketing plan for the rest of the year. Since your calendar is the playbook, you’ll want to ensure that you hit every important date and holiday with the accuracy of a darts champion (yes, there is such a thing).

Comb over your calendar and ask yourself if you’re leading into a sale too fast or too slow. Perhaps you’re diluting your messaging by sending too many emails in one week? Maybe you’re neglecting a particular audience segment??

It’s all about pacing your messages and ensuring that each campaign is as impactful as possible. Use this time to perfect your cadence, because you do NOT want to shuffle dates around in the middle of a Black Friday rush.

Prepare for the Holidays

Hopefully you’ve been doing this from the get-go, since the holidays are a major part of any marketing program. Preparing for the holidays means perfecting the campaigns you’ve already got planned. Think of it as your final flight check before taking off.

In marketing terms, Halloween is tomorrow, Thanksgiving the day after, and Christmas is coming up in a few days. For each holiday, you’ll want to ensure that the mechanics of each sale are rock-solid and that the messaging is as crystal-clear and simple as possible.

Are you 100% sure that:

• Your landing page is ready?
• All discount codes work correctly?
• You have adequate stock?
• You have campaigns prepared to let your customer know about your sale in advance (especially VIP segments)?

These are just cursory points but the gist is this – the earlier you start creating your holiday sale campaigns and checking that the mechanics work, the more time you have to ensure that everything runs smoother than a jazz band on a Friday night.

Final Thoughts

It might be old, but it’s still true: Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. While others are saying “It’s September? Already?!”, you’re doing push-ups in an action movie montage. Make no mistake – it’s about to get hairy. But, with a little bit of planning and forward thinking, you can breeze through the rest of 2024. Then, once the dust has settled, you have permission to sit back and congratulate yourself on a marketing job well done.