12 Copywriting Tips for Your Holiday Marketing Email Push

Last week we talked about planning strategy for your retail clients’ holiday promotions blitzes. This week we want to talk about holiday email content.

 1. Think Campaign, Not One-Off

You holiday marketing including your email marketing, is not a one-off. You will be sending a series of emails starting in October and going right through after-Christmas sales. Marketing builds on itself. You want to be providing your client’s customers with information long before Black Friday, particularly if your client is selling a technical product that their customers may want to research before buying.

2. Create Urgency

We don’t need to tell you that’s it’s always recommended to create urgency when trying to make a sale. With the holidays approaching, fortunately you have some built-in opportunities to do so.

Here’s a few possibilities for your clients’ holiday email content:

• Supplies are limited on the much sought-after XYZ Contraption! Get here early on Black Friday before they’re gone!
• Only three days left for our pre-season sale!
• Don’t miss these special offers!
• Time is running out! Only 7 more days to Christmas!
• Place a countdown timer or even a gif that represents a countdown timer right in the email.

3. Be Clear

You may know all about your client and their products, but that doesn’t mean the world at large does. So, unless your client is extremely well-known, it’s not enough to just send a blurb that says “50% off on Tuesday!”  You want to remind your client’s audience of things like what your client sells, the benefits and why they should buy from your client. No, you don’t need to write a book, but be clear. There may be a time to send mysterious emails. Black Friday isn’t it.

4. Show the Goods

Emailing your client’s customers is a great opportunity to personalize. You will be sending email to a list of people who have opted in. That means most of them will have had some connection with specific products They may have bought products from your client, left products in their shopping carts, viewed them on the website or expressed interest in specific products in other ways, perhaps through surveys you have done.

Sure, at the holidays when they are gift shopping, customers may look at products they wouldn’t normally. So, you may also want your holiday email content to feature your client’s best sellers. And before Black Friday rolls around, you should have some email out there featuring your hottest Black Friday deals.

Don’t crowd your email with so many product photos and messages that they lose their impact. Save some of it for another email. And as we have already stated, personalize the products you show as much as possible.

5. Don’t Overwhelm Your Audience

Studies show that when people are giving too many choices, they tend to become indecisive and unable to choose any at all. In other words, too many choices can reduce sales. So, if you are trying to make an immediate sale, and particularly if you are trying to make a sale directly from an email, less is more.

6. Stay on Brand

Ideally, you have spent months or even years developing your client’s brand and what sets them apart from the competition. Stick to that. Don’t let yourself be drawn into sounding and looking the same as the competition. Sure, you will have holiday shopping messages and design, but they should be consistent with your client’s look and feel throughout the year.

You have been working on connecting customers to your client’s brand. Look for ways to remind your client’s customers of that connection and tap into it.

7. Look for Ways to Break Through the Clutter

Your client’s company isn’t the only one that will be emailing their target market through the holidays. So, you need to get noticed. Here’s some possibilities:

• Offer your email recipients special deals unavailable to others. After all, these are your client’s customers or people who have otherwise shown enough interest in the company to opt in.
• Use visuals. Consider videos or carousels to bring customers right into the experience of using your client’s products.
• Enable your client’s customers to make purchases directly from the email.

8. Use Humor

People buy from people and companies they like. And it makes your company much more likable when can give people a laugh. Humor can be particularly effective when you write funny subject lines.

9. Make Holiday Shopping Easy

Holiday shopping can be a chore, so encourage your clients to try make it as easy as possible for their customers. If your client offers such things as free shipping, free shipping above a certain purchase point, gift wrap options and guaranteed delivery dates, make sure your holiday email content lets customers know.

10. Be Truthful

In your passion for getting people in the door or to the website, it may be tempting to overstate the case either in the subject line or the body of your email.

Never overpromise what your client can deliver. Overpromising will turn around and bite your client when their customers lose trust.

11. Tell Them What to Do Next

A good holiday marketing campaign email needs a strong and very visible call to action.

What do you want the reader to do next? Buy directly from the email? Be first in line (be that in-person or virtual) when the doors open on Black Friday deals? Go to the online store and shop now? Whatever, it is, tell them! And include a visible link or button to get them where you want them to go.

For your button or link, never say click here. Say something specific such as See Black Friday Deals Now!

12. Have Your Landing Pages Ready

There is nothing worse (well, within this context anyway) than getting excited about an email offer, clicking the link and being taken to some general page with no sign of the desired offer in sight. Make sure your landing pages reflect the messaging and style of the email. Make sure landing pages feature the offers or products your client’s audience expects to see.

Umbrella Can Write Your Holiday Email Content

Umbrella can help you with all aspects of your holiday email campaigns from strategy to writing to design to writing to implementation. Contact us for a free consultation about our white label email marketing services.