The 3 Email Rules You Must Follow This Holiday Marketing Season

Plan to send emails this holiday marketing season? Stay off your subscribers' naughty list by following these 3 email rules. They'll help you reduce unsubscribes, increase your sales, and get the right message into the right person's hands. This post was based on our popular holiday marketing webinar! Click this link and register to watch it on-demand.

Let your subscribers mute your emails

Problem: Promotional email volume increases significantly during the holiday season. And what do most people do when the volume is high? They hit the “unsubscribe” link. Sending just one too many emails in a given time period might push your average reader to reconsider their subscription. Solution: Include a “mute” button or link in your emails. This will  reduce your unsubscribes during periods of increased sending. Your audience might want to stay on your list and hear from you . . . just not right now, or not about this particular topic/promotion. Give your audience the freedom to choose. Plus, this allows you to send messages to a segment of subscribers that actually WANTS to receive them. You’ll likely see higher conversion rates, higher opens and clicks, and higher revenue generated from this targeted audience. Related: 11 Festive GIFs for Your Holiday Marketing Emails Here's an example of how to incorporate a "mute" option. Using AWeber’s click automations, you can apply a tag to any subscriber that clicks the mute link or button. Below, I named the tag "muted-2019." Now, whenever you send an email that shouldn’t include the subscribers that explicitly said “mute me,” you can easily remove them from the send list. After this tag is applied, you can create a dynamic segment (a fancy word for group) of subscribers that do not have the mute tag. This is the audience who still wants to hear from you. See the example below. I created the segment by choosing anyone who "is not" tagged with muted-2019. This pulls all other subscribers in your list who do not have the muted-2019 tag, and makes them their own segment. When the promotional period is over, or you are back to your regular send frequency, start sending to everyone again!

Discover your best offer with split testing

Problem: How do you know what product or service offer will yield the most sales during Black Friday or Cyber Monday? How do you know what subject line will stand out in an already crowded inbox? The truth is . . .  you don’t. Solution: Split testing (or A/B testing) an email to a small percentage of your email list will give you an opportunity to discover what works! If you sell physical products, you might test different percentage discounts, or a buy one, get one free offer. If you sell services, like coaching or consulting, you might consider testing a free hour of coaching v. a percentage off your normal rate. Using AWeber’s split testing feature, I can test two offers (below): 20% off v. 30% off. I'll send two emails. Each one will go to a small, random segment of my list — say, 10% of my list. In AWeber, I can track the success of the emails to see which offer was most popular and drove more sales. Then, I can send the winning promotional email to the remaining 80% of my list. An email promoting a 30% discount will likely perform better than an email promoting a 20% discount, but by how much? Testing helps us confirm our suspicions and gain insights before we send a promotion to the whole list. (Many email marketing platforms limit what you can split test. Take Constant Contact and ConvertKit. They only allow you to split test subject lines. With AWeber, you can split test nearly every aspect of your emails: subject lines, send times, copy, templates, buttons, and more! This gives you the power to optimize your email strategy. Try it today! Start your 30-day FREE account with AWeber!) Related: 6 Email Split Tests You Can Set Up in Under 1 Minute

Re-engage your sleepy subscribers

Problem: Many people sign up for email lists and then slowly stop engaging with the messages. It’s unlikely these subscribers will ever click through and take advantage of your holiday offer, no matter how enticing it is. Solution: Wake up your sleepy subscribers with a smart re-engagement campaign. This is your chance to have your brand become top of mind before your holiday promotional emails are delivered. Inside AWeber, you can easily search for subscribers that have not engaged with your emails over a period of time. Here's an example of a search for "no opens" over the past 90 days. Then, you can save this as a segment to target with a re-engagement or winback email. (You can also search for subscribers who haven't clicked a link inside your email over a certain time period. Here’s more info on how to do it in AWeber.) Now that you have your unengaged segment, send a message to invite them to stay on the list. This might include an incentive to stick around, or some extra useful content. Here's an example the AWeber team has sent before: If they still don't engage (open or click)? It's in your best interest to unsubscribe these subscribers. Unengaged subscribers can negatively impact your open rates and deliverability, or they may even hit the SPAM button when your content arrives in their inbox. Related: Why You Should Delete a Bunch of Subscribers Right Now Want more expert tips on how to write a subscriber winback or re-engagement campaign? Here’s an entire post full of them.

Want to learn more?

Check out the webinar! Watch it on-demand. AWeber provides the best suite of email marketing tools to help you conquer the holiday marketing season and beyond. Try AWeber for 30 days (FREE!). You can even chat with our Customer Solutions team to get your account set up. (Our team is available 24/7 at our Pennsylvania headquarters!)

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Contributer : Email Marketing Tips