By Digital
The busy vacation season is heating up. With it come elevated advertising and marketing duties, similar to creating and executing electronic mail campaigns, which take time. On this put up, I’ll counsel 3 ways to streamline your ecommerce electronic mail advertising and marketing all through the vacation season.
1. Set a Calendar
Establishing a visible calendar of all upcoming electronic mail deployments at the very least one month upfront — a couple of month is even higher — can tremendously streamline the workload. Embrace the next info in your calendar.
- E-mail theme and outline
- Promotion or provide, and expiration
- Viewers
- Deployment measurement
Together with the expiration dates of the provides will assist see how your promotions correspond to different necessary dates — similar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday — and when to ship electronic mail reminders of expiring provides and promotions.
Take a couple of hours to arrange the calendar for the upcoming month or months. It would save vital time later and it’ll assist keep away from a last-minute rush to get campaigns out the door.
2. Create Reusable Templates
Each electronic mail inventive doesn’t should be designed from scratch. Create a handful of templates to reuse for sure kinds of deployments. It may possibly save lots of time. The bottom line is to create a couple of completely different templates, in order that the pictures, featured merchandise, and hyperlinks might be simply switched — with out having to code contemporary HTML.
Some simple templates to create and reuse embody the next.
- Basic promotion
- New product arrival
- Content material-newsletter
The preliminary template will possible take time to design and code. Every template needs to be actionable on a cellular gadget. Design all templates in order that updates to pictures, textual content, and hyperlinks won’t have an effect on how they render throughout gadgets and electronic mail platforms.
A well-designed template, as soon as used and initially examined, doesn’t essentially should be retested for formatting and rendering points in subsequent deployments. This may even save time.
This electronic mail template might be reused with solely fundamental adjustments to the textual content, similar to location and date of the occasion.
Many electronic mail service suppliers provide templates to make use of and reuse. Watch out, nonetheless, when creating a template and modifying with WYSIWYG editor. It doesn’t, in my expertise, all the time render appropriately throughout all main electronic mail purchasers and browsers.
It’s best to design your template in a program like Adobe Dreamweaver and check for rendering with platforms similar to E-mail on Acid or Litmus earlier than importing to your electronic mail service supplier.
Word, nonetheless, that most ESP platforms will add their very own code to your HTML, to redirect hyperlinks and host photos. These templates won’t all the time translate cleanly in a distinct platform, down the highway.
3. Borrow from Previous Promotions
When planning and scheduling campaigns, producing concepts for promotions and themes might be time consuming and tough. One supply of inspiration is earlier campaigns which have labored nicely.
Begin with campaigns that have been deployed on the identical time final yr. You (and your electronic mail recipients) could have forgotten about previous gross sales, occasions, or different campaigns from final yr. That is very true for campaigns across the holidays when electronic mail quantity is excessive.
Contemplate making an particularly inventive theme or promotion an annual custom, in order that subscribers truly look ahead to receiving these emails.
Meals Community’s “12 Days of Cookies” marketing campaign in an annual custom that recipients acknowledge and anticipate.
Meals Community has a superb instance of this with its “12 Days of Cookies” marketing campaign, which begins in early December yearly. It’s a every day e-newsletter that includes a favourite vacation cookie recipe by a celeb chef. It additionally consists of messages from advertisers and different content material that hyperlinks to the positioning, to generate site visitors. The tactic is extraordinarily efficient. Recipients not solely anticipate receiving the e-mail, however they’re additionally conscious of the promotion.
These and comparable emails could possibly be constructed and scheduled weeks or months upfront, leaving you free to deal with different duties.
