Back To Business: 10 Email Marketing Tips To Get Started After The Holidays

It’s time to channel fresh minds, rediscover energies and take a polished look at everything that was done before leaving for the holidays. These are the weapons available to you to refresh your email marketing strategies, from defining editorial plans to updating your campaign graphics (some interesting insights in this post) and reorganizing your budget.

If you still haven’t done any of this, have no fear. Here is a quick to do list to help you regroup and plan the rest of the year.

How did the subscriptions go? Which campaigns performed best? Before taking on the last four months of the year, analyze the sending reports to assess the effectiveness of your email and SMS marketing.

Based on your findings, identify the email template that achieved the best results and adapt it to the campaigns for the new season. Use that same model to experiment with new possibilities for the design, copy and call to action. Finally, complete an A/B test and start the new season with the right mindset for finding new winning solutions!

After every long break from email marketing, it is good to set aside some time to clean up your lists of recipients. This ensures the best conditions for new activities in terms of deliverability.

Since a large number of inactive contacts can cause delivery problems, we recommend sending a re-engagement email to all your contacts who haven’t opened your messages in the past nine months. If this last contact opportunity doesn’t lead to anything, it is time to remove those recipients from your database.

Regarding duplicate and invalid addresses, MailUp automatically processes new subscribers to identify syntactical errors or typos, managing bounces and unsubscriptions. This makes sure your contact lists are always clean and reliable.

Before leaving for the holidays you should have prepared (or at least drafted) your editorial calendar for September. Now is the time to review what you have planned with a fresh head, to improve it and integrate it.

Later you can focus on the remaining three months, paying close attention to deadlines and holidays to take advantage of to launch targeted campaigns, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Good pre-planning makes all activities easier and help you avoid the typical mistakes that arise when doing things last minute.

With fresh eyes and a clear mind, review your template gallery objectively, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Then act on all email items, by reviewing the call to action button both in terms of color and wording, making it more incisive, and as clear and concise as possible. Try out a new font for the header and body of the message and shake up the image arrangement.

You don’t need to be a web designer to revamp your campaigns identity. All you need is the right tools and knowledge of the best practices of email design.

Deciding and managing the budget is one of the key moments of the post-holiday period. If you haven’t done it yet, why not invest a part of your funds in SMS? Here are some figures: 90% of smartphone owners open an SMS within three minutes of delivery, and the click-through rate of an SMS campaign is about 30%, with an average conversion rate of 18%. SMS is the most agile tool for communicating with your customers, and your products and services can gain new momentum once integrated with an effective email campaign.

If you want to take your email and SMS marketing activities to the next level, there’s also MailUp Enterprise, the version of the platform that uses tailored solutions and a customer success service to maximize performance in terms of delivery rates, and to achieve the best sending quality. If you’ve been wanting to crank up your email marketing for some time, what better moment could there be than now?

Your database is a composite environment that gathers the brand’s potential and loyal customers together into the same pool, combining those with moderate average expenditure as well as those with greater economic resources.

Segmenting the database means distinguishing between the various behaviors and attitudes of your contacts, recognizing your consumers’ identity to target them with relevant offers that address their individual interests and means. MailUp has many functions for advanced segmentation of contacts, from filtering (demographic, geographic, or by activity and device) through to auto-profiling modules.

After you have segmented your database, you can seamlessly (re)define your flow of automated send-outs to deliver the right message to the right recipient, such as a new subscriber to your newsletter or blog. With MailUp, all you need are a few simple drag & drop operations to fine tune workflows that work for you and to manage the entire customer journey chain, from the first contact through to retention activities.

8. Reward those who purchased in the summer

The best way to cultivate relationships and retain customers is to gratify them. Thank and reward your contacts who made a purchase by sending them a follow-up email. This shouldn’t be a generic automated email, but rather a personalized message with a lively and authentic tone, including a special coupon for an additional purchase.

To officially close a season and go back over the first nine months of the year, you can create and send a top ten of the most purchased and top-ranking products. There are many variations on the theme, so you can find the right approach to engage your customers.

9. Sale on sale: direct it to the most appropriate target audience

This season has passed by and summer is almost over, but it is unlikely that the tastes and interests of your clients have changed radically in the space of a few months. That’s why we recommend taking advantage of dynamic fields to send personalized campaigns and automatically re-suggest the products that each contact viewed and placed in their carts. Relaunching offers should be supported by an additional discount.

You can automatically launch dedicated offers and discounts with personalized coupons based on each level of spending. You can choose whether to guide customers through a purchase of the same value as their previous one, or direct them towards products with a higher price tag.

10. Make a teaser for season news

If you have planned innovations and projects to be launched in the coming months, teaser emails are a powerful tool for generating hype around your brand and products. Depending on the size of the project, create different emails to accompany the official launch, revealing new details about the changes ahead, step by step.

A landing page is another tool that can be useful for your cause, as it can host more information or even allow pre-orders. With MailUp, a few drag & drop operations are all you need to create a landing page optimized for mobiles.

September is a key month to look back at what you’ve achieved throughout the year with a fresh head, so you can assess your strategies with a clear mind and perhaps even tweak some things here and there.

All you need is the right tools, like MailUp. Try out our email marketing platform free of charge for 30 days and tell us how it went!