Everyone spoils themselves and their loved ones a bit more than usual during the holiday season. As a result, ecommerce sales tend to spike naturally during this period. When reality hits again in January, a dreadful sales slump may follow. This can be a real morale downer for even the most optimistic of teams out there.
So what can businesses do to keep online sales ticking over after the holidays? Email marketing is one promotional avenue that can help. Using it to its full potential means working towards boosting the bottom line to the point of laying a solid foundation for the rest of the year.
Post-Holiday Email Tactics to Keep Sales High
Approaching your email marketing strategy with one eye on the latest trends is always a good place to start. Piggybacking on these exclusively, however, is not going to boost your ecommerce sales in a sustainable manner. Businesses playing the long game will appreciate the following easy-to-implement ideas that promote short-term conversions, while encouraging customer loyalty along the way.
1. Target leads that didn’t convert over the holidays.
Your website analytics should already be set up in a way that tracks visitors who leave while still having items in their cart or those that click off right before placing their orders. These hot leads may have been put off by a technical issue or a simple distraction, both of which should leave you hopeful that they will still follow through with their purchase at some point.
Targeting these leads — specifically those who have also subscribed to your mailing list — with highly personalized emails is the best way to get them to convert. Existing email subscribers who clicked on one of your email’s CTAs recently but didn’t end up converting are good to target as well. A simple remarketing campaign on social media could also lead to a couple of surprise January sales, helping you inch nearer to a target more closely resembling December’s figures.
2. (Re)invest in the best content.
Ecommerce businesses should always prioritize creating engaging content, which is essential for helping to grow your business. It’s a good idea to kick off the new year by (re)investing in high quality, relatable content for all email marketing campaigns directed towards your target audience. Adding a pair of fresh eyes (like a freelancer) into the mix to create punchy copy from different angles can lead to better open and click rates, and ultimately lead to more conversions.
A decent marketing automation software can help to take care of the logistics of executing and tracking campaigns without using up human capital in any way. This gives the team more time to focus on getting the content right during a month when the business truly needs all hands on deck to boost its sales.
3. Create well-timed additional promotions and offers.
Staying at the forefront of your customer’s minds at the start of a new year is essential to getting through the January sales slump. This is easy enough to do by creating a few additional promotions to encourage them to pay your online store one final visit before the year officially gets going. These discounts don’t have to be extreme (like on Black Friday) to make an impact on your sales. They should just be well targeted, timed and tapping into the needs of your email list segments at this very moment.
Remember not to stop your promotions too early, as this time of year is when many people have gift cards to redeem. Entice these customers-to-be with free shipping for the month as a way to get the sale immediately, rather than when they dig the gift card out of their wallets a few days before it expires.
4. Revisit email audience segments.
If your email list is buzzing with many different segments, take an hour to talk to the marketing team about which need tweaking and which have historically been the quickest to convert. A quick deep-dive into your campaign analytics from the last 12 months should be able to tell you this, along with presenting new insights that can be helpful to encourage conversions during the month.
Also brainstorm a couple of ideas for new email segments to try, especially with the team feeling creatively refreshed and ready to go after the holidays. You might be rewarded with a bunch of extra sales that will dramatically improve cashflow right away.
With the right email tactics, keeping your sales high after the holiday season is more of a possibility than you might think. Your team’s efforts may even lead to finding exciting new customer segments that will lead to boosted sales figures during the course of the year. Armed with a solid base to work from, your business will be riding the sales growth wave consistently in no time at all.
