It's that time of year again, Christmas is a mere few weeks away. Christmas is one of the busiest times of year for any marketing team, with so many key milestones to plan for.
Getting organised is key. So, to help we have put together a guide about how to plan and execute your Christmas newsletter campaign.
Like Father Christmas who has been making his list all year, Christmas newsletter planning shouldn't be left to the last minute. You should start planning as early as possible.
A strong Christmas newsletter plan will help your campaign have a higher chance of success.
Before you begin planning your newsletter campaign there are a few questions you need to ask:
After going through these questions it should help you to be able to segment your audience. By Segmenting your subscribers you can target them with tailored offers and content. This will give your christmas newsletters a higher chance of engagement.
Key to your planning success is to review the previous Christmas performance. Below are some areas of performance you can look into:
With all our talk of performance, engagement and analysis we have compiled a few metrics which you can use to not only review last years campaign but also this years:
Christmas is a four week period so we recommend creating a campaign calendar. Like an editorial calendar it will need to highlight the following:
Bare in mind this calendar should also align with all activities taking place across the business.
More often than not most brands marketing campaigns focus on attracting new customers. Brands forget they have an existing pool of customers who have brought into their brand.
What a "loyal" customer looks like will depend on your business. We have some questions you can ask to determine what a loyal customer is:
This is a great way to segment your customers so your Christmas newsletter campaign has tailored content & offers for them.
By segmenting your subscribers into a loyal customer group you can create a Christmas newsletter stream which delivers tailored content and offers for them only.
For most of us getting in the festive mood, means one thing - decorating!
But before you get the tinsel, snow gifs and elfs out, there are a few considerations you need to take into account.
From the list above you can see what creative resource you have and put in place some design guidelines.
Like any marketing campaign, resources and budgets are tight. With a Christmas newsletter campaign which is multifaceted you need to be realistic. So ask yourself:
If you have existing templates that is great all you need to do is update them with your festive branded assets.
This is again dependent on resource and skill level in your team.
If you decide to get your newsletters designed and built in house there are a few points for you to review below:
Unless you have time on your side, a secured budget and team to be on tap things can get complicated, slow and costly!
It may feel we have put a damper on you getting festive and creative. But asking yourself tough questions means you remove potential pain points and blocks.
Utilising templates for your Christmas newsletter campaigns will allow for you to:
If you think using templates might be the right solution for you, we have created a library of professionally designed Christmas newsletters templates. These templates are perfect for all eCommerce marketing needs this festive season.
As with any campaign it is key to get planning in as early as possible. Planning your newsletter campaigns is about more than performance metrics.
Use the handy questions in this post to identify your potential pain points and blockages early that could impact delivery!
Be realistic about what you and the team can achieve with the resource and budget you have.