Holiday Email Marketing: 5 Things the Big Dogs are Doing
Major corporations have the luxury of being able to conduct massive market research and hire the most savvy (and expensive) marketing consultants. Even though your company may not share their stratospheric budgets, there is much to learn from the strategies which the Big Dogs are pursuing in their holiday email marketing this season. After all, it can be just as profitable to replicate as it is to innovate!
Here are the top five holiday email marketing trends which major brands are applying this year:
1. Website & Store Split Offers
Most email marketers either promote a website or a brick and mortar store, but the major brands are geographically targeting their email campaigns to be able to direct consumers to the store closest to them as well as the website.
By dovetailing geographical segmentation with website IP address detection and cookies, the online visitor can receive customized information tailored to their location. This practice not only ensures that holiday snow shovels are being promoted to Minnesotans while surfboards are being pitched to Californians, but that only the products actually stocked in the local store are being prominently featured.
2. Brand-Specific Purchasing Apps
Everyone knows that the world has gone app crazy, but there are many uses for these apps other than playing games or finding the nearest Thai take-out. Specific purchasing apps are being developed by the major brands in order to facilitate their customers' ordering. By providing innovative interfaces to the purchasing experience, the ordering process can be maximized in efficiency and frequency.
3. Incentivizing Social Media Traffic
There is an evident and quantifiable value to each social media subscriber, therefore many major companies are offering incentives in the form of discounts or gifts for subscribing to their Twitter feeds or to new Fans of their Facebook page.
By driving customers to these social channels and groups, brands encourage a level of participation and conversation which in most cases significantly outweighs the cost of providing the incentive in bottom line benefits.
4. SMS Codes
The most significant paradigm shift of 2010 has to be the wholesale migration to a mobile online experience, and the major email marketing players are keeping abreast of the developments by adding specific codes which can be sent via SMS in order to receive time sensitive email alerts. Which brings us to what is arguably the most flabbergasting development of all:
5. Time-Sensitive Emails
Email has come a long way from the age when it would be checked once or twice a day, to the point where real time email is now a reality for the vast majority of an American population which is equipped with mobile phone devices.
Given this newly found immediacy, many of the major players are migrating to what would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago: The promotion of same day sales! Sending out an email in the morning for a special sale or promotion which is occurring that same afternoon can derive significant benefits and build traffic in both websites as well as the brick and mortar locations.
The ability of being able to reach an ever more gallivanting populace regardless of where their daily traipsing takes them clearly represents the next phase in email marketing campaigns. By combining mobile approaches with newly developed social networking sensibilities the major corporate brands are pathbreaking next generation email marketing methodologies.
Join the pioneers and blaze your own trail to email marketing success by implementing these innovative Big Dog strategies this holiday season!
