As you may already know, e-mail marketing is becoming an extremely important medium for businesses to get in touch with their customers. According to a study from Campaign Monitor, e-mail marketing has been the medium generating the most ROI for marketers for ten years in a row. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 83 percent of B2B marketers are using e-mail newsletters as a form of content marketing. If you’re just getting your feet wet into e-mail marketing, here are six must-send events throughout the year.
1) Start of the New Year
The New Year comes with plenty of opportunities to promote new product offerings or services. This can also be a great time to win back customers who might have left abandoned shopping carts during the holiday season and to examine your e-mail lists. Look at your contacts and separate them by behaviors or areas of interest within your site. This way, you can make it simpler to send the right message to the right list.
2) The Start of Summer
Depending on your industry and client base, you might find that the start of summer is a slower time for business. This is a great time to focus on your frequent customer base and inform them on other services you offer throughout the year. Offer a special code to your e-mail customers only on some of the most commonly needed items. Use your site search data and other reports through your e-mail marketing provider to look at what sold well, and what did not. This can help you determine what types of e-mails worked best with your customer base as you get busier towards the end of the summer.
3) Back to School
If you have children, think of all the things they need when they go back to school: new clothes, new school supplies, and other materials. College students need new appliances and new electronics. When focusing on your back to school campaign, keep in mind that most consumers are looking for their products at the lowest price possible. Subject lines are where you can get creative. Don’t be afraid to point out the exclusivity of offers, or use emojis in your subject line. Just ensure that you still remain on topic and have a clear subject line, so that the recipient knows exactly what you are trying to offer him or her.
4) Breast Cancer Awareness Month
Regardless of industry, there’s always something you can present around Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. Whether it’s an employee of yours going the extra mile to support breast cancer research, or you want to round up all of the products your business sells with benefits going towards breast cancer research, you have a variety of options with this event. If you are doing an e-mail regarding breast cancer awareness, you’ll want to make the reader aware in your copy about how common it is for someone to be diagnosed with it, along with other relevant statistics that will resonate with your target audience.
5) The Entire Holiday Season
When you’re preparing for the busy holiday season, consider starting off by creating a holiday gift guide. This will be your basis for your e-mail marketing campaign for the end of the year. You can start off with aninformative e-mail letting your customers know about the items on sale and try to engage your prospects that have browsed your site, but not yet bought. In these e-mails, try to include product videos if possible. According to Hubspot, the use of video in e-mails can lead to a 200 to 300 percent increase in your click through rate.
6) Cyber Monday
You’ve might have already optimized your site for eCommerce success before Cyber Monday, but letting your customers know about special offers or other holiday related content is an important next step. Last year, CNN Money reported that Cyber Monday sales hit $3 billion. Find a common theme for your e-mail, along with a strategy that you want to promote. For some of your most loyal customers, you could preview some of your sales in the days leading up to it by setting parameters on how much a customer spends per order within your e-mail campaign manager. For customers of our 7cart eCommerce Platform, this can be done through our e-mail automation partner Rekko.