How Your Holiday Email Marketing Strategies Can Build Your Brand’s Presence

Most eCommerce stores think of the holiday season as a big opportunity to make quick sales and some serious revenue. While this is true, here’s another reason to get excited for the holidays.

It’s also a great chance to build your brand presence and deepen relationships with your existing customer base. That being said, it’s important for you to learn how you can use your holiday email marketing strategies to build your brand’s presence and create loyal customers.

Remember, repeat customers, spend 46% more than first-time shoppers. After their second purchase, there’s also a 45% chance that they come back to spend more money. So here’s what you need to know about how your holiday email marketing strategies can actually contribute to building your brand’s presence.

Holiday Marketing Strategies Can Fuel Customer Loyalty

It’s not a battle of coupons and discounts. You don’t win repeat customers by offering a better deal than your competitors every year. You just win over price-shoppers with low AOV (Average Order Value) and zero customer loyalty.

Newsflash: It’s the holiday season, and every single one of your competitors is running sales. To tell you the truth, many of them might even beat you when it comes to prices.

Building your brand presence and loyalty in the holiday season comes from everything other than price cutting.

It’s the perfect season for some major personalization

John’s Crazy Socks is dedicated to out-service major online retailers like Amazon. Every purchase includes a hand-written letter, and in the holiday season, bundles are hand-wrapped.

The extra personal touch leads to an astounding increase in returning customer rate of 2,067% from 2017-2018. (If you’re counting, that’s 20x improvement on average in a single year.)

You don’t have to invest as much time and effort as John but follow his lead. Add a personal touch on email and social media and reap the rewards.

Personalize your emails with relevant offers, thank yous, and relatable seasonal greetings. It’s the perfect strategy for the season of giving and receiving.

Holidays are a time when inboxes get flooded by impersonal sales message after message. Going against the grain and showing that you care about your customers is an effective strategy.

Check this out! Paul Jarvis takes a unique approach during the holiday season with his list of 35,000 subscribers.

He wins loyalty by respecting his subscribers’ inbox. Obviously, as an eCommerce store, you can’t follow suit, but it’s good to also remember how busy everyone is. A lot of people don’t open their emails during the holiday break and come January and they see it’s flooded, they’ll just bulk-delete all promo emails.

Use email surveys to test the water

Trying to predict what the market wants can be complicated, and focus groups are expensive and typically ineffective. How would your holiday-themed products fare amongst the sea of themed-goodies bombarding your customers?

Here’s some food for thought— wouldn’t it be amazing if you could just survey your customers and have them give you their insights directly?

Maybe something like this:

Original holiday products are a unique form of content marketing. If you combine it with social media, it can even become your primary word-of-mouth marketing strategy.

Since people are social creatures, personal recommendations are still a strong sales and marketing tool.

It can be hard to get traction on social media channels with the same products as everyone else. If you can use your most loyal customers to design a great and unique holiday product, your brand will have a powerful advantage.

Bump up your social media presence with Holiday email marketing strategies

It might seem weird to rely on email to improve brand presence, but continue reading. Your happy customers are your biggest branding asset. Not only can they help you develop new products, but they can also help you market existing ones.

And what’s the best channel for reaching those customers? Email. Research shows that subscribers are 3 times more likely to share social media posts than content from other sources.

Social media is an excellent channel for building brand awareness if you have an engaged audience already. So give your social media campaigns a much-needed push with email support.

Here’s an example. Check out this user-generated content powered campaign by Starbucks that’s centered around a limited-time holiday-design product:

The ability to let your audience contribute in real-time is a unique strength of digital marketing. You can outsource content for free, and engage your most loyal customers in one move.

If any designs really blow up, you can even create an official collaboration with the customer who designed it. But face it, maybe you don’t have as many followers as Starbucks.

‘Tis the season to give back to your customers.

So, get the word out with email instead. It’s another plus point for personalization and inclusivity. In a sense, asking for your customers’ insights will make them feel like VIPs.

The options are endless. If you take the right approach, you can leverage your holiday email marketing campaigns in a way that will also boost your brand’s online presence.

‘Tis the season of giving, so take it a notch higher and actually connect with your customers. More than the constant stream of revenue, you get to build a solid and stable eCommerce brand that can be recognized anywhere on the world wide web.

If you need more ideas of strategic campaigns, or you just want a second opinion on your current strategies, don’t hesitate to hit us up. Schedule your free strategy session and start revolutionizing your holiday marketing strategies.