Christmas is coming, people have already bought gifts and are more receptive than any other time of the year, so you should take this opportunity to send an email marketing campaign that connects with them.
It doesn't matter if you're an international brand, an SME or a freelancer, your customers will appreciate receiving a Merry Christmas email.
Christmas emails are the perfect tool to send our best wishes and thank our customers for their loyalty.
However, you are not the only person who wants to congratulate your customers. Think that at this time of the year everything is saturated with advertising, shopping malls, telephone lines, postal mail and even the inbox of our subscribers.
Christmas is a time of love, but also a time of much competition for brands, so you have to use all the tools at your disposal to win the attention of your recipients.
This Christmas, improve the subject line of your e-mails
For those of us in charge of email marketing, every email campaign is a challenge, and this challenge starts with opens. Getting our subscribers to open our email is an increasingly difficult task, especially in what seems like an endless sea of holiday emails.
You need to come up with an effective subject line for your holiday emails that will help you attract the attention and arouse the curiosity of recipients. Here are some points to keep in mind:
- Size: although there is still no exact answer as to how long or short the email subject line should be, remember that our readers' eyes work like a scanner looking for keywords; with this in mind, a short subject line will make it easier for you to attract recipients' attention and will be more likely to be viewed in its entirety from any device.
- Pre-header: the pre-header is the sentence that follows the subject line and is also displayed before an email is opened. If your subject line has been short, you can use the pre-header as a supplement to provide more information.
- Generate expectation: the best way to increase open rates is to create hope or the possibility of getting something in the minds of our users, use short phrases that talk about what they will receive if they open your email.
- Video: if you are thinking of including a video in your email (we recommend that you do), placing the word video in the subject line can help you increase your open rate by up to 20%.
- Personalization: in Christmas emails it is essential that you personalize the subject line, as it is an element that connects with the user and reinforces the illusion that you have sent this email exclusively for them.
Think about your Buyer Persona
Although we believe that Christmas has the same concept and value for everyone, the reality is that each person thinks differently.
If we follow the findings of Neuromarketing, that each person forms their own mental constructs from the emotions and experiences they live, we can deduce that Christmas is no exception and therefore does not mean the same for everyone.
For this reason it is important that before creating the content or email template, you analyze the interests, tastes and especially socio-demographic traits of your customers, so as not to make any mistakes in the message you want to communicate and you can awaken positive emotions in the minds of your users.
There are also many elements that you can use to arouse positive emotions around Christmas, elements that have been adopted within some social niches as Christmas icons, for example, the Santa Claus clothes, which were adopted in red as a result of a series of Coca Cola campaigns; or the traditional Christmas tree, the sound of bells, Christmas carols or the typical sweets of each region.
To connect with your users, the ideal is that in your email content, you play with some of these elements and add those that most synergize with the expectations of your customers.
Christmas video in the email
After the subject line, the content of the email is the most important thing to pay attention to, because you only have 8 seconds before the recipient decides to continue reading your email or discard it.
Video is the only content capable of attracting the attention of users in such a short time, because in addition to being much more attractive than an image, it connects directly with emotions and awakens the senses.
By this time of the month you have surely created a Christmas video to share through your website, YouTube channel or social networks. Well, this same video could be included in your Christmas email, this way you will save time, resources and maximize the views of your video.
It is important to clarify that for your email marketing campaign with video to be successful, it must be viewable within the email, we are not talking about images with links to YouTube or attachments, we are talking about videos that play within the email.
Embedding videos in your emails is very simple, you just have to create a FREE account at www.viewed.video, upload your video in our platform and wait a couple of minutes for us to process it. Once this process is finished, we will give you a code that you can copy and paste into your email marketing template, then you just have to send your campaign through your ESP or emailing platform..
Check out our tutorials to learn how to embed autoplay videos in your emails.
Personalization
As we mentioned in the first part of this article, personalization at Christmas is a key factor to connect with your customers.
It is very common for email marketing platforms to have tools or controls that allow you to add personalized elements to the text of your email, such as the name of your customers, their age, birthday or any other information you have collected to build your database. This is not only practical but also indispensable to use.
But when it comes to the creative element that you will include in the email, it is difficult to talk about personalizing it, since you would have to create hundreds of images or gifs in order to send a completely personalized experience.
A better option is to send personalized video cards created automatically from a csv. file with the information of your subscribers that you want to detail in the video.
In Viewed we have developed such a powerful technology that we are able to create and deliver a personalized video for each recipient. We can help you customize the voiceover, the text and even the image that appears inside the video.
Prepare now your best Christmas email with a personalized video to congratulate all your customers in a unique, effective and easy way. Schedule a meeting with our sales team today.
Don't forget the call to action
Although we are talking about an email greeting and not a commercial campaign, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that this also constitutes advertising for your brand.
Christmas greetings should not only be aligned with the values and image of your brand, they should also have elements that help you achieve an objective, such as increasing traffic to your website, being a reminder for those less recurrent customers, etc.
Including a call to action in your Christmas email marketing campaign does not mean that you saturate your email with commercial information or buttons linked to your eCommerce, because if you do, you will detract from your creative content, you will block any positive emotion that you have been able to arouse, therefore, the intention to connect with customers will be lost and you can get them to delete your email or mark it as SPAM.
You must be very smart, precise and discreet with calls to action. In the case of videos embedded in the email with Viewed, they can have a personalized link or click-to-action that takes your customers to your website or a landig page, so you will not saturate your email with links.
Conclusiones
- Before creating your Christmas greeting email, think about your buyer persona, what motivates, interests and pleases them.
- Create unique and different content, capable of arousing emotions.
Include discreet and specific calls to action that go hand in hand with your Christmas greeting. - Do not saturate your Christmas email with commercial information.
Personalize your content to reinforce the illusion that it is exclusive and designed for each recipient. - Create a concrete and short email subject, in which the customer understands that it is not a commercial email.
Subscribe to our blog to stay informed about email marketing best practices.