Email Marketing: 3 Tips for Surviving and Thriving During the Holidays

Your early fall checklist:

• unpack those sweaters
• stock up on apple cider
• plan your holiday emails

Yes, already. Now is the time to get your holiday campaign together.

With so many festive preparations, it’s easy to skip special campaigns for the holidays. This means many businesses miss opportunities to sell gifts, share joy and earn customers’ appreciation.

Want your emails to shine brighter than the rest? Of course you do. Here are 3 ways to create a sparkle that’s sure to attract eyes this season.

Pop Up On Pinterest

If you haven’t set your brand up on Pinterest, you might want to get started with this super-informative course run by – who else? – Ali.

If you’re set up, though, the holidays offer you a huge opportunity at visibility as gift-givers search for the perfect presents.

To Survive:  Note your Pinterest presence in your email campaigns, even with just a “follow us on Pinterest” button. Even better, feature images you’ve found on Pinterest in your emails, either as a consistent feature or worked into your other content. Link back to your Pinterest boards so readers can follow them to see more. The more places they see your brand, the better.

To Thrive: If you have an e-store, go through your product listings and add ‘Pin This’ labels to the images. If not, hold a contest for your email subscribers. Choose a theme relevant to your emails’ content, and ask readers to put together a related board. Judge the boards and send the winner a free gift.

(By the way, if you’d like email marketing inspiration on Pinterest, check out AWeber’s boards!)

Pick A Partner For Cross-Promotion

If you don’t know what you’d pin on Pinterest and writing’s really not your thing, cross-promotion may be your weapon of choice.

Find a business in your niche that provides different products or services. (Do you sell cupcakes? Pair up with a coffee shop. Have a clothing line? Find an accessories designer with a similar style.)

If each of you promote the other, you’ve both just doubled your audience – and your potential customer base.

To Survive: Determine how you’re going to promote each other. If you blog, exchange posts written for each others’ audiences or sponsor each others’ emails. If you don’t, exchange ads to be featured on the others’ sites or email footers.

To Thrive: Create a bundled product that contains goods from both of you: an entire outfit ensemble with your clothes and their accessories, a gift basket with their coffee and your cakes. Promote your new combination on your site, emails and social channels, and ask them to do the same.

Have An Ebook Ready For Afterwards

With all the tablets and iPads being given as gifts, ebook sales spike post-Christmas. It’s the perfect time to have a tome of your own on the market.

It can be a paid product, or, if you expect it to drum up significant business, you can make it free and still benefit.

To Survive: In your niche, there are specific things your readers want to know. Write up an ebook chock-full of answers. Get it into the Amazon Kindle store or the iBookstore. Or, at the very least, make it available on your own site.

To Thrive:  Get your book written and available in e-stores. Promote it through email and social media as a free gift – and ask your readers to leave good reviews.

Then, by the time the holidays come around, your  book could be on the “best sellers” list for your niche, making your book appear near the top in searches.

At the end of your ebook, ask the new readers you’ve attracted to subscribe to your emails with a helpful link.

12 Gifts to Spread Holiday Marketing Cheer

At AWeber, we’ve been studying email marketing (and practicing it ourselves) for 14 years. We’ve pulled together the best of what we’ve gleaned from previous holiday seasons and packaged it all up into gifts, plus, we designed a few special little sparkly somethings to make your campaign shine.

Get it all at holidayemailmarketing.com, where you can sign up to receive email reminders when the gifts arrive on September 17.

We wish you happy holiday marketing!

Amanda Gagnon is Education Marketing Associate at AWeber, the leading email marketing service provider for small businesses, where she advises business owners on how to grow their business with email marketing. You can find advice from Amanda on the AWeber blog. To learn more about marketing during the holidays, visit holidayemailmarketing.com.