How to Create an Email Marketing Sequence to Engage Your Audience and Boost Sales During Holiday

The holiday season serves as an amazing opportunity to boost your sales. There are many ways to engage your potential customers and pitch them your solutions. However, email marketing stands out as one of the most efficient and cost-effective tactics.

Pulling off a successful email marketing campaign for the holiday season may not be as easy as it seems, as everyone is trying to grab your audience’s attention. Recipients’ inboxes get absolutely flooded, and cutting through all that noise to keep people engaged is a huge challenge.

The best way to tackle this situation is to create a killer email sequence. It comprises a series of emails that work together. A well-thought-out email sequence keeps your audience hooked, guides them smoothly towards making a purchase, and helps boost those holiday sales.

Today, we’re going to walk through the process of creating an email sequence to engage your audience and grow your sales during the holiday season.

Step 1: Plan Your Email Sequence for the Holiday Season

Any campaign you plan is bound to yield subpar results without proper planning. So, you need to lay out a solid plan before you start drafting and dispatching your promotional emails.

Define Your Target Audience

Knowing your audience is the first step to ensure the success of your holiday campaign. You must segment your recipients comprising your email list, as it allows you to send personalized promotional messages that resonate with their needs. Sending the same generic email to everyone simply won’t cut through the noise.

By splitting your audience into smaller, defined groups, you can tailor your email copy and offers specifically for the recipients in your respective email lists. Personalization makes your emails stand out and be more effective than those of your competitors.

Set SMART Goals

Once you have identified your audience, the next step is to define your goals. You must know what you intend to achieve through your email campaigns, as it helps you measure your campaign’s success.

You can’t just say that your goal for the campaign is to increase sales. You need to be specific. Plus, you must see that your goals are measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This way, you have a clear target to aim for, and it allows you to track your progress effectively.

Choose the Right Email Marketing Platform

After you have defined your goals, you will need the right tools for your plan. Your email marketing platform serves as your central hub for sending holiday emails and tracking their performance.

You must look for an email marketing solution that offers key features that help you execute your plan effortlessly. Automation capabilities play a huge role here. Plus, you must look for a solution that allows you to segment your email list.

Analytics are also super important. You need to see if you can track notable email marketing metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and the revenue generated by your emails.

Step 2: Craft Compelling Email Content

Once you are through with the planning phase, the next step is to start creating compelling email content for your campaign. The way you create your message and the way you present it make all the difference in grabbing attention and driving action during the busy holiday season.

Personalize Your Subject Lines

The first thing that catches the attention of your target audience is the subject line of your email. During the holiday season, inboxes are more packed than ever. So, the standard subject lines won’t cut it. You need to personalize them to make them stand out.

A compelling subject line creates a sense of curiosity, highlights a clear benefit, or creates urgency. Personalization helps you connect with the recipients and make them want to consider the suggested action in the email.

Your subject lines should also be concise. Keeping them under 50 characters is the standard practice. You can also sprinkle in relevant holiday emojis strategically to add visual appeal and make your emails stand out.

Craft an Engaging Email Copy

Once your recipients open your email, it’s your copy that does the magic. It persuades the intended audience to consider the call to action. Your email body copy should be clear, concise, and focused on the value or benefit you are offering the reader. You should get straight to the point while still being friendly and approachable.

Personalization isn’t just limited to your subject lines. You must also personalize the body of your email. Using the recipient’s name and tailoring your message to their specific interests goes a long way and helps you engage the intended audience segments.

You can also leverage storytelling to grab the recipients’ attention. Consider sharing a brief anecdote about how your product or service solves a problem or brings joy during the holidays. Social proof also comes in handy here. You can use the reviews or testimonials of your happy customers to engage the recipients.

Use Compelling CTAs

Every email in your sequence should have a clear purpose. Your call-to-action must clearly convey what you want recipients to do next and what they should expect afterward. Please don’t make them guess what’s to come.

You must come up with something new and powerful rather than settling for a CTA that’s just cliché. However, try not to get overboard with your creativity. You must find the right balance between the unique and the tried-and-tested.

You should strategically place your primary CTA where readers are most likely to see it, perhaps multiple times in a longer email, but don’t clutter the email with too many different actions.

Step 3: Build the Holiday Email Sequence

Now that you know how to create compelling emails, it’s time to build the holiday email sequence. Here, you put different emails together in a logical order to engage your recipients. Each email in the sequence must serve a specific purpose and lead the recipients naturally to make the buying decision.

Pre-Holiday Buzz

Starting your holiday campaign before the season is a smart move. You get the head start and are able to generate excitement with the likelihood of scoring some early sales. You can tease upcoming promotions, showcase new arrivals for the holiday season, or offer exclusive early bird discounts to your subscribers.

Offering an incentive, like a small discount or free shipping for early orders, can motivate people to make buying decisions. It also rewards your proactive shoppers and helps spread out your fulfillment of orders.

Personalized Product Recommendations

As the holiday season progresses and people are actively looking for presents, your product recommendations may come in handy and help people make smart buying decisions. You can provide these recommendations based on customer insights.

Product recommendations based on a subscriber’s past purchases or browsing history can be highly effective. You are essentially doing the hard work of gift-finding for them. So, your recipients are likely to appreciate your effort. Your recommendations streamline the shopping experience for the recipients and remove friction from the buyer’s journey.

Last-Minute Deals and Reminders

Not everyone is quick to make buying decisions. Some of them wait till the final hour to purchase products that they need. You can entice this segment of your recipients by creating a sense of urgency. You can pitch the last-minute deals, offer free shipping, or go with further price cuts.

Your message should emphasize that your offers are for a limited time only. Sending reminder emails about the items left in the cart may be a brilliant move on your part and a powerful tactic that can help you boost your sales in this phase.

Post-Holiday Thank You Message

For the final message in your email sequence, sending a thank-you email is a brilliant idea. You express your gratitude to your recipients for choosing you over other alternatives, which reinforces their positive experience with your brand.

Plus, you can tease upcoming promotions and introduce new products to encourage your email subscribers to stay connected with your brand after the holiday season. It helps transition the relationship from the transactional holiday period to ongoing engagement throughout the year.

It’s a Wrap

Engaging the intended audience through your email sequence during the holiday season may not be as easy as it seems. You’re not the only one competing in the race to grab the attention of your target audience. There may be countless players in your respective industry.

The way you design your email sequence helps you cut through the clutter. By sending a series of targeted, valuable emails, you keep your audience engaged and guide them towards making a purchase.

We covered all the necessary details that you need to know and shared the essential steps for creating an effective email sequence for the holiday season. If you’ve been struggling to get promising results from your campaigns, try the tactics we recommend and see if they help.