How to boost your festive email campaigns

In this Lunch and Learn, Minal Patel shows you how to use email marketing to boost sales in the run-up to Christmas and why you should always include email marketing in your festival marketing toolkit.

Minal founded Marketing by Minal in 2016 to help time-strapped small service providers get to grips with email marketing.

Using her over 20 years of marketing experience and 12 years of email marketing experience, she works with small service providers to help guide them to overcome their email marketing fears and frustrations, start connecting with their communities and make those all-important sales.

Topics covered in this session

• The different types of shoppers and how to adjust your strategy

• Tips for creating engaging, festive-themed email marketing campaigns

• How to use the festive period to grow your list

Minal's key points from the webinar

• Email marketing is essential for boosting festive sales. It's all about building relationships, targeting the right audience and tailoring content to get the best possible engagement and ROI.

• Email marketing offers a 97% to 98% deliverability rate, which makes it more reliable than social media for reaching target audiences.

• For better results, focus on growing a targeted list of relevant subscribers rather than a large list of unengaged people.

• To be most effective, tailor your campaigns for different types of festive shoppers. Segment buyers into early shoppers, deal-seekers and last-minute shoppers, and send targeted campaigns at the most appropriate times.

• Tailor your festive email content to your audience. You could send an email series in the run up to Small Business Saturday, offer exclusive discounts and communicate Christmas hours to boost engagement and sales.

• Your festive email campaigns will have a bigger impact if you manage expectations and offer incentives for signing up.

• Identify your main touchpoints with your audience and then provide valuable content that's designed to grow your email list.

• Make your content high-quality and valuable. Short emails with 20 lines or less, and three images or fewer, perform best, according to Constant Contact's analysis of one billion emails. Avoid spammy formatting like using several types of punctuation, going heavy on exclamation marks and including words like "Cialis" in subject lines and content.

• Analyse your email campaign reports and use that insight to refine your marketing strategy.

• Constant Contact offers a complete digital marketing platform for small businesses with a 30-day free trial and plans starting at £8 a month.

About Enterprise Nation

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About Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers email and digital marketing tools that make it easy for your small business or nonprofit to get the attention and revenue it deserves. Constant Contact has joined Lunch and Learn to share its extensive marketing expertise.