Is it a good idea to launch a holiday email campaign to acknowledge Black Friday, Christmas, New Year's, Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Back to School, and any other holiday or occasion you can think of? It could even be Tacos Tuesday if you want! 

Yes, indeed it is. 

So let's talk about holiday email marketing campaigns. Because you want to do these right. 

Ready to find out how to get your subscribers to buy like crazy when you launch your next holiday offer? 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:08) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(3:32) Why are holidays a good time for email marketing?

(6:40) The psychology behind deals and promotions.

(9:20) Why holidays are a tricky time for email marketing?

(10:55) Create a dedicated offer for that specific holiday.

(14:40) Prep people for the offer in advance.

(17:13) Launch your holiday offer and surround the market.

(20:24) Running a successful holiday email marketing campaign.

(21:00) Get people to click on the links in your emails - check out Click Tricks!

(22:24) Subject line of the week.

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Why are holidays a good time for email marketing? 

Psychologically speaking, when you launch a promotion or a special offer to mark or acknowledge a holiday, you're creating momentum and giving people a reason to buy. A lot of copywriting advice emphasises the importance of using the word “because” in your copy. And we often talk about that too. If you're running a discount or a special offer, give people a reason why you're doing it. It could be anything, but make sure to have a reason. And a holiday is a reason in itself!

A great example of this is Prime Day. Amazon went and created their own time of year and reason for having a sale! And it’s no coincidence that they run it in October, which is typically a quieter time for retail. They've effectively manufactured a holiday! Another example is Boxing Day, which is big in the UK but not everywhere in the world. A lot of people will wait until just after Christmas to buy discounted goods in the Boxing Day sale. And why wouldn't they?

The psychology behind deals and promotions

So why are holidays so good? Because people are in proactive, spending mode. It’s the actual opposite of when they’re scrolling on social media, and they suddenly see an ad – this is called interruption marketing. When a holiday is coming up, we're all out there looking for deals. And a holiday promotion (or a sale) is giving your customers an excuse to buy and justify to themselves why they’re buying something.

Think about 3 for 2 deals, for example. When we see those types of promotions, we end up buying 3 products instead of the one we originally wanted! So spend more money but still feel like we got a great deal. We got something for free, right? Would we have spent that much money in the first place? Probably not! This shows the promotion worked - we spent more and feel great about it, too. It's because of the self-justification that happens when people grab a deal. And as business owners, we can tap into that. 

Holidays are the perfect opportunity to get customers to feel good about their purchases. And that’s not in a scammy, unethical, or dodgy way. Because you’re definitely selling them something worthwhile, and they feel happy with that purchase. 

Why holidays are a tricky time for email marketing? 

Obviously, holidays are busy times when it comes to people's inboxes. As a consumer, you must have noticed the increase in email volume. Because everyone is doing a promotion! Think of all the emails we get about Black Friday deals in November, for example. 

There's definitely a lot of noise, and if you're doing your own promotion and sending emails about it, you're competing for people's attention. Your job at this point is to try and stand out. And you want to do that by making sure that in the run-up to your holiday promotion, your deliverability is good.

For example, if you only email your list once a year on Black Friday, chances are that a lot of your emails won't be delivered on that day. Email platforms like Gmail, on those days specifically, know that there’s going to be a higher volume of emails. And because of the increased security, a lot of them won't even make it to someone's inbox. So you need to make sure your sender's reputation is great by working on it all year round.

Create a dedicated offer for that specific holiday

So how do you stand out with your holiday email marketing campaigns? The first thing you can do is to put together a dedicated offer specifically for that holiday. That means you should avoid rolling the same thing out every year. Don't use every holiday opportunity to sell things from the same angle. If you use the same discount or offer, you're acting like the furniture store where the sale never ends! (You know the one).

In this time and age, you definitely want to be more thoughtful about the offers you create. So think about a way to tie your promotion to the specific holiday, rather than offering the same promotion again and again.

If you are the type of business that can do that, try and relate your offer to the occasion. A restaurant, for example, could have mums eating for free on Mother’s Day. We understand that’s not always possible or applicable to your business, but definitely keep it different and fresh every time. If you sell courses, for example, you could bundle a couple of them together, and then change that combination up for your next holiday promotion.  

Prep people for the offer in advance

Another tip we can give you is to prime people in advance of your promotion. Don’t just spring the offer on your list at the last minute! Instead, let them know a bit earlier. Tease them and build them up to the offer. You could do that by showcasing what's going on behind the scenes, for example. Build up their excitement so they're queued, primed, and ready for the day.

For example, a couple of days before the offer goes live you could run a piece of Facebook ad. Talk about something interesting that has to do with your niche (not your offer, necessarily), and try to build an audience around that. You just want people to get interested in what you do, so you can send them to a waiting list and ask them to opt in to hear more about your sale.

When you're ready, you start emailing the people on the waiting list and your usual subscribers, too. You could build excitement by showing the behind-the-scenes of what your offer is. That can be as simple as recording a video showing them what's in the sale but without telling them the price. You share when it’s going live, what they’re going to get, and how much it’s worth. But you don't tell them how much they can get it for.

This way, you build up the hype so that people are ready and waiting for you. You effectively give them the heads up. You’re telling them that there is going to be a sale for that particular holiday, and they can soon take advantage of it. 

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Launch your holiday offer

The next step is to launch the offer. To build up the anticipation for it, you send a few emails saying that the sale is coming. You can do a preview or some teasing to add anticipation and curiosity. You could even have people guessing what’s going to be included in your offer and ask them to hit reply to get some engagement out of it.

You then send a bunch of emails about it (and probably more than you normally would), and that campaign will culminate with the announcement that the offer is finally here. You might feel uncomfortable with the amount of emails it takes to build anticipation and excitement for this promotion. But we guarantee you won’t be uncomfortable with the amount of sales it generates and how much you put in the bank because of it! That’s a good trade-off, don’t you think?

To give you an idea, you might send a couple of emails every day in the lead-up to the launch and then even 3 emails on the day when the promotion closes. The last email on the last day is the final warning to say that the cart is about to close, and you’d hate for people to miss out and have to pay full price. So be comfortable with sending lots of emails to drive people towards your offer!

Surround the market

We use a strategy that we call surrounding the market. All it means is that you want to tell people everywhere about your promotion. So as you’re building your waiting list of people, keep running ads to those who watched your videos and showed interest in your product, for example.

You want to create what we call an environment of zero competition through your email list and on your social media. In other words, wherever people look, they'll see your offer because that's all you're talking about at the moment. And the great news is that you don't need a huge budget for that - just a bit of forethought.

Running a successful holiday email marketing campaign

By now, we hope we convinced you that you don't want to wake up on the morning of a holiday and decide to run a promotion just because everyone else is. That’s probably not going to be hugely effective for you. You missed the boat! If that's the case, just consider it a lesson learnt and get ready to launch a campaign for the next holiday. Start preparing, planning, and writing the material, and go out all guns blazing on the next campaign.

Not sure where to start? Pretty much all of the email marketing campaigns inside our membership The League will work for this. We have a dedicated Black Friday campaign, but this can be applied to any other holiday or period. And once you tie your offer with the work you're doing on other platforms (social media, ads, etc.) you've got the recipe for a successful holiday email campaign. 

Get people to click on the links in your emails! 

Obviously, to get people to see your offer, you first need to make sure they open your emails and click on the links inside to go check out the sales page. And in order to do that, you'll want to maximise your chances by training your subscribers to click on the links inside your emails. Because if they don’t, they'll never get to the stage where they can enter their credit card information and buy from you! So don’t let your audience become blind to the links in your emails and scroll past them simply because they always look the same.

That’s why we created a FREE resource with 12 different ways of dressing up the links in your emails. It helps you capture people's attention and makes them want to click and go check out your offers. If you want to get your mitts onto this lovely free piece of content, go grab Click Tricks.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “We’ve kept this secret (from you).” And it’s an interesting idea because it sounds like we’re building up to a surprise. But then because we added the bit “from you” in brackets, it makes the subject line sound almost sinister. It’s like we didn’t tell you, specifically, about this thing. Does it mean everyone else knows? No one wants to be the butt of a joke, right? So people will open the email driven by curiosity to find out what that’s all about. Check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Run A Smashing Flash Sale With One of The Best Email Marketing Campaigns In The World.

How To Get Back On The Email Wagon When You Fall Off (Back To School Edition)

The 2 Best Times Of Day To Send Promotional Emails – Making Bank With Paul Counts.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

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Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

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Unknown 0:25

And it very quickly turns into the into the furniture store where the sale never ends, that kind of thing. But yeah, this guy was like it's Mother's Day. So it's Father's Day. So it's Valentine's Day. So it's Easter. So it's just the same offer every single time. And the truth is that you want to be into it in the modern age of 2023 2024 onwards you really want to be more thoughtful about how you put the offer together create something that is a Black Friday off or is a Christmas offer or is a Mother's Day off or create something where the where it is tied into the holiday in some way where this is not an offer that you're just going to roll that over and over and over again. Equally. Take one of your things or two of your things and unless you're an economist or if you're like if you're selling you know, membership sites or courses or something like that, take a couple of courses, link them together and sell those specifically in a specific offer where the offer is like, nailed on, you know exactly what it is people get gonna get an offer on this particular thing or set of things bundled together. And I tell you if you can, it's not always possible. I think it's really nice when some some kinds of businesses can relate it to the occasion. Great example not really in our world at all, but a great example is Mother's Day. At a restaurant. Your mother eats free. Yeah, perfect. It's definitely you can't rule out, hey, it's Father's day your mother eats free. Well, you might be able to shoehorn that in in a sort of funny way, but it's not exactly gonna work. So is there a way you can relate what it is? So maybe if you teach some kind of meditation, you might talk about this is the one for the mothers, you know, this is the mother's you know, me tie meditation or something like you know, at a discount or meditation package, something like that. It could be as simple as there's a really famous market that has a thing called the mother of all offers. Well if he's already got a thing called the mother of all offers on Mother's Day, if he discounts the mother of all offers. That makes sense because it's got that word of it, try and have some kind of unity some kind of relationship between what's happening and what it is but you can't always do it. So it has to just be actually this is the Black Friday sale and it is unique. So one year you might do these two offers together as a package at a discount. The next year might be two different things. Or it might be a different, it might be five things or it might be one thing. You do need to keep it different fresh each time definitely. So that's the first thing have a dedicated offer. The second thing is to prep people for the offer in advance. You don't just want to spring it on people and let them know that it's coming. instead. You want to start a little bit early with this. There's a lot of different ways you can do this. We'll talk about them. You want to basically tease people and build them up to the offer, showcase what's going on behind the scenes and build up their excitement so that they're sort of they're sort of queued and primed, no pun intended Amazon Prime, they're sort of primed and waiting and ready for the day. And the moment that the offer goes live a couple ways you can do this. You could run a Facebook ads to a piece of content like when you talk about something is interesting. You build an audience of people who are interested, I think it's nothing to do with your offer. It's just about your niche. So if imagine you're going to launch a Black Friday sale and it's going to be about baking muffins. You might do a piece of content about the you know the six different types of muffins, you can bake a grid, you run that as a just a piece of content and it builds people interested in you and in baking those six types of muffins. I am hungry now. And then basically, they will be put into a Facebook audience and then you can refer those people into a waiting list to get them to opt in to hear more about your Black Friday sale and again, this applies to Halloween on Mother's Day or you know your own invented thing like Prime Day if you wanted to. You build them into ads, you run them to ads to get them to an opt into a waiting list and then you can email the people on the waiting list as well as emailing your own list about the waiting list. Of course you can email the people on the waiting list to show them behind the scenes and what your offer is. We've done this in our Black Friday campaign quite a few times where we'll record a video where we show them all the things that are in the Black Friday sale. But we don't show them the price. We just go this is what you're gonna get but you know how much it's going to be how much it's worth, but you don't know how much it's going to be. Let me tell them when it's gonna go live. It's gonna go live at 9am UK time on Tuesday or Black Friday or whatever. And you build up the hype so that people are ready and waiting for you even email our list for our Black Friday sale in advanced called the days before and tell them don't buy from us for the next couple of days. Because there's a chance that whatever you're going to buy will be available on Black Friday as a special deal. My stepmom used to go into clothes shops and she would go to the shop system and say I know you're not allowed to tell me but are there any sales coming up? And quite often just for the brazen cheek of at the shelter system? We've got actually I'm not supposed to tell you this right but there's a sale coming up three weeks on Tuesday to our great I'll be in there and then we'll go. So you know, we'll just email people and give them the heads up. Listen, it's Black Friday, we aren't doing something for it. Here's specifically what we're doing for it if you're gonna buy any of these things don't Yeah, I love it. And then of course, the next step is to actually launch that offer so you can start by building up the anticipation for the offer with some email saying hey, it's coming and here's some previews and you might do some teasing whenever you're holding it but you blow it out or or I see a nice one where there's a photo in the email again, if it wasn't enough a good a fair to add anticipation and curiosity. Were the things wrapped up or it's in the envelope. It's in the box and you say the special thing we're going to have on specials in this box. What do you think it is hit reply, let me know, get some engagement out of it. And then you just send a bunch of emails. You gotta send the email that says boom, here it is. Nice short email. You're gonna say you're gonna send a whole bunch of emails you gotta send eat more emails than you normally would maybe more emails and actually make it comfortable. We do. You know, are we saying we love and are really comfortable how many emails we send No, but really comfortable with the results it produces with the amount of sales and the amount of money you put in our bank. So that's what we do we make that trade off. So you probably want a couple of emails every day of that offer. Honestly, launching at the beginning of the day, a little one later on saying wow, well yeah, this has been popular. It has been and and then getting people over there answering questions and then leading up to when it closes on the last day. We're almost certainly going to do three emails. One of them the day sends the last day one halfway through. So it's the only the end and then one final warning say it's about the close because what I would hate for somebody to get to their inbox and go ah, totally missed that. And now we're gonna pay full price. That feels shocking to me that doesn't feel nice or friendly. So, yeah, lots of emails to make sure we're driving people towards the thing. And then what we don't want to do is be siloed in this thing, want to make sure that we caught we call it surrounded the market surround them. And at the same time, as you're sending these emails, if you've built this custom audience of people who watched your videos on social that Rob just mentioned, start running ads just to the people who've watched your videos. That means you're not competing with everybody else's big budget. Because you've already targeted the people who watched your videos, you create what we call an environment of zero competition. You create this thing called the environment of zero competition in two places. One, your email list to your socials right and now everywhere this person looks they are seeing your offer and you don't need a massive budget. You just need a bit of forethought. So these these holiday marketing campaigns just you can't wake up that morning. Oh shit. Everyone's doing a Black Friday sale. Everyone's doing a Christmas sale. Everyone's doing a new year sale and go I should put one together Now honestly, you've missed the boat. What you want to do on that day is go right I've missed today's one. When's the next one? Because I'm gonna get prepared to launch that campaign and use that day as the side by signal to start preparing start planning start writing the material so that you can go out all all that all guns blazing on the next one. So that's what you want to do. Let's do a quick summary. That's four tips in order to really make this holiday marketing campaign thing fly. One have a dedicated offer to prepare people for your offer. That means you need to be prepared in advance is going to be said three launch that offer using great email campaigns. Pretty much any of our campaigns inside our programmes will actually work for this. We do have a dedicated Black Friday campaign that can also be applied to any any any period as well. And then tie in your other platforms. Get this working on ads, get this working with your social media if you got a Facebook group and Instagram, wherever your big social platform is, use that as well. Super cool. Yeah, I mean, of course, all of this depends on making sure that people get your emails see the offer, and they click the links in your emails to go and check it out. And one of the things you all have to fight against is people just scrolling past the link in your email. If they read your email, they go, Oh, that was really good. And they don't click and go and check it out. Well guess where the checkout pages guess whether the field is where they enter their credit card information? Well, it's not in your email. So if they're not clicking the links in your emails to go and check out your webpage they can't bite and one of the biggest enemies we all have within the email inbox as people not seeing your emails and they not see them because one they blend in or two more often. They actually just become blind to them. They actually just scroll past them because they look the same all the time. And that's what we found was starting to happen. people's attentions are all over the place, this time with pretty pictures and interesting things they want to do. So that's why we've caught with 12 different ways of dressing up the links in your emails. So they capture people's attention and make them want to click and go check out your offers. And we're putting together in a lovely resource that is exclusive for you here as a listener to that your marketing show. If you go over to email marketing heroes.com/tricks You'll be able to download that it's totally free. Just put your email address here. You can download it at email marketing heroes.com/tricks Now it's time for this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. What have you got? This one is we kept we've kept this secret in brackets from you. We've kept this secret and then in brackets from you. Yeah, I love this because it's sort of the fact we've kept selling secret is sort of an interesting idea. It sounds like you're building up to a surprise but then to put from you in brackets sort of makes it sound almost sinister. Like we didn't tell you about this. And of course when it only sounds like only you everybody else knows about it, but kind of only you which is nobody wants to be the butt of that joke. But when they get inside of the email, of course they're gonna understand what you're talking about. So yeah, I think it's I think it's really cool on it. So that's this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Thank you so much for making it through the entire episode today. Hopefully you got loads of ideas for running your next holiday sale, but back next week with a brand new episode, where we'll share with you more ideas that you can go with us to make more sales with doing the marketing but make sure you do hit Subscribe on your podcast player or else you're risking your risk of missing it and we absolutely hate that we'll be here hopefully you will be too We'll see you back