Holiday Email Marketing Tips

Have you started sending holiday emails yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Holidays are that time of year when people shop the most, and chances are that your small biz can benefit greatly from that. Successful email marketing is an amazing tool to reach out to your target audience and turn them into buying cust0mers.

If done right, that is.

If you’re sending emails just to send them, it won’t yield the results you need.

If you really want to impress them, stick to these holiday email marketing tips:

Plan in advance

A good marketing strategy is the first (and perhaps the only) thing you need to generate sales. A large number of marketers who know how to make a killer email holiday campaign start planning as early as August. But it’s not late now either.

Email marketing should be at your to-do list if you want results. There is no excuse – make a plan and stick to it. Let’s take a look at some of the tips on how to grab the attention of your target audience through holiday emails:

Focus on mobile

The first practical advice is to focus on mobile, and for a good reason. More and more people are checking on their mail and viewing it from the mobile devices. To put things into perspective, it has been reported that in 2014 that more that 50% traffic was mobile during holiday seasons. Below are a few tips on how to make sure that your emails are mobile-friendly:

Use an email template that is mobile-optimized

Keep it short and snappy

Three sentences on your computer may look like 6 sentences on your mobile device. So, make sure there isn’t too much text, otherwise people won’t even bother to read it. You emails need to be catchy and a bit personal, something people can relate to. Something short but powerful that will make them want to know more. 

Make it simple

The best email promotions are simple with a clear layout. If you have too many colors or use 5 different types of front people may get distracted from the main goal. And that is – to take some kind of action. 

Run a social media promotion

Prior to actually creating an email campaign, run a promotion on Facebook, Instagram etc. If you want your customers to respond to your holiday emails, first you have to remind them of who you are. Just to get their attention. So that when they receive an email from you, they’ll know who you are and they will be more likely to take action.  

Make them engage with you on social media. Engagement is the best way to get closer to you customers and stay on top of their mind. Run a holiday photo contest to make your followers engage. Alternatively, offer buy-one-get-one-free promotions to spur engagement. 

Use proper CTA

A call-to-action is supposed to make people buy something, so you need to make it catchy and simple. For an eye-catching call-to-action you can visually emphasize it. Also, you don’t have to use CTA just once – use it several time throughout your email.

The paradox of choice – stick to one

If you want to lead your potential customers to one single action, make sure you lead them with one single thought in mind. Even though you may have several products you’d like to offer, stick to just one, or to several relatable ones. You need to hack into the psychology of a buyer’s mind. Sometimes less is more, and in this case it seems to be truer than ever. People get easily confused if they need to choose between several things. 

Pay attention to the subject line

Last but not the least – make a killer subject line. Since the subject line is the first thing people see when they get a new email it’s worth investing some thought into it. How many times did you not open an email because of a crappy boring headline? Probably more often than you can remember. The same goes for your subscribers. If it doesn’t spark their interest, they won’t open it. There will be so many emails anyway, why would they waste time on reading yours? Because you have to offer them something others can’t. So express that in your subject line. You can do that by asking a question – questions resonate well with customers. And, of course, add some holiday spirit to it!

November 2015 Pages at the Prop Business Series

The Efficient Professional Series: the Battle for Your Email Inbox

Click HERE to get your tickets for the November 10th, 2015 event today

Join us at the Indianapolis Propylaeum to highlight Indiana authors and provide a lunch and learn opportunity for attendees sponsored by AddressTwo. The author for our November Business Edition will be Robby Slaughter, author of The Efficient Professional series of books, the Battle for Your Email Inbox.  This month’s talk Robby will be covering one of the books in his series called “The Battle for Your Email Inbox.”

November Featured Indiana Author
Robby Slaughter
www.accelawork.com

Robby Slaughter specializes in working with teams and individuals on building complex systems, evaluating existing services, and resolving difficult issues and producing useful documentation.  Robby’s key areas of interest or workplace process and productivity, team dynamics, and business process mapping. 

Based on his book, The Battle for Your Email Inbox, our lunch program will cover why email is one of the most overwhelming forces in the modern office and how he’s found new and exciting ways to take control of your email inbox so that it doesn't take control of you.

The Business Edition of the Pages at the Prop series will be held the 2^nd Tuesday of each month. The November business lunch lecture will be held November10th, 2015.  “Early Bird” tickets are available October 19^th-31^st at $25.00, regular tickets are $30.00 and group sales tickets are available at $22.00 each (for groups of 3 or more from a company or organization.)  Tickets include the lunch and lecture.  Doors open at 11:30am with the author presentation beginning at 12:00pm. Q&A, book signing, and networking will follow the presentation with books available for purchase at the event.

Click HERE to get your tickets for the November 10th, 2015 event.

Learn more about the this beautiful Indianapolis event space: www.the propylaeum.org

The Power of Small Business CRM Software

Are you tired of storing your customer data in spread sheets, emails and who knows where? Are there other employees interacting with clients and you’d like a way to supervise the activity? Do you feel like things are slowly getting out of control? All is not lost. There’s a solution - Whether you’re a small or a mid-size business owner, having a good CRM software is no longer an option nowadays – that is, if you want to stay in the game.

What makes CRM so powerful?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps small and mid-size biz owners to increase their sales and customer satisfaction by sharing the customer information throughout the system.

With CRM software, biz owners are able to predict customer behavior while scaling up their services.

If you’re still not convinced, let’s see exactly what this software can do for your biz:

• Integrity of information: CRM software stores all the data you need at one single place. The data is stored in a consistent and user-friendly way so that everything is at your fingertips whenever you need it.

• Customer – Employee interaction: CRM software automatically keeps track of every interaction between the customers and company representatives. This is good for two reasons. Firstly, you can determine customer behavioral patterns, and secondly, you can estimate employee performance.

• Evaluation of marketing success: With real info at hand, you’re able to track the success of each and every marketing tactic you employed. For example, you can assess how many people were referred to you by being a member of Rainmakers or paid advertising, so you can know what to focus on in the future.

• Tracking the progress of your biz: Finally you can have real data at one place to evaluate the success of your business. This is crucial to business of all sizes. If you don’t have accurate data, how can you know what exactly is going on with your sales and ROI? Tracking the progress is a prerogative to business success.

Thousands of business owners have already embraced this amazing tool and they’re doing much better than before.

What’s your excuse? Do you want to get in control of your own business? Get ahead of the pack and sign up for our Simple CRM software today!

Status Quo Requires No Leadership

It may seem saying, “Status Quo Requires No Leadership” is pretty radical, but when you really look at how the business environment is, and always has been, it’s not radical at all.

Some businesses feel that things are just fine, they are making enough to pay the bills, don’t have to work TOO hard and days go by relatively pleasantly. But is that what owning a business is all about? Is “just getting by” all you wanted when you made that first sale?

Just about every SBO I talk with wants MORE – more clients, more sales, more challenge, more profits more, more, more. Once they achieve one goal, they set another. It’s not all about money, although money is a measurement of where you are and where you want to go.

When you want more, as I see in my coaching and with participants in the Grow Your Business Masterminds, the inevitable is change. And if change is the password, learning is the key to the lock. The lock is held firmly in the hands of the leader.

Suwit Ritjaroon, 123rf.com

Not only does a leader have to help set direction, but also facilitate the path. The greatest leaders pull in all their resources to develop a plan to address all the changing conditions and ripples caused by shifting sands and new pebbles thrown into the mix. They have to constantly increase their knowledge base through both personal and professional development.

Remarkable leaders push and pull people through the status quo to bigger and brighter levels. Remarkable leaders also broaden the vision and inch the line forward regularly. They remove the status quo because the status quo is never the finish line. Leadership is what propels the change and growth.

Do you really want to maintain a status quo and an easy, non-leader position, or do you want more and to go further and build something remarkable?

Take a look at all the resources you have at your fingertips – coaches like me, tools like AddressTwo, other like-minded SBOs, social media, and your expertise and knowledge. You probably have everything you need to pull up your leadership socks, put on your track shoes and run a successful and growing business.

Take a few minutes to objectively look at where your business is flying and where you want it to fly. What change is necessary? What resources and tools do you have and need? What do you need to learn or discover? If you need help with this exercise, let me know. You can do it.

To Your Success, 

                                                                     

-Jack Klemeyer, (I pull on my red leadership socks every morning…)