Three E-Mail Marketing Tips for Growth after the Holidays

As marketers, the holiday shopping surge provides more than only revenue. This time gives us a spike in new traffic and a plethora of data, two things that are necessary to growing a business and informing future marketing campaigns. If your holiday season was as busy as some of our clients’ here at Trellis, you may have seen a December uptick in new users between 20-40% compared to the prior three months’ average. It’s time for us marketers to roll up our sleeves, dig into the data, and make sure we use the past to create a successful future. Here are three tactics to capitalize on the holiday website traffic bump to inform marketing strategies and drive business growth in the future. 

Create Advocates

According to a YouGov poll, only 16% of American Christmas shoppers make purchases before the end of November. That means the majority of buyers had less than a month to make purchase decisions, not a lot of time to truly educate themselves on products, let alone become an advocate of your brand. Now’s the time to pay close attention to the post-conversion portion of the marketing funnel and work on creating loyal consumers of your product.  

An easy way to create loyal users is by maximizing the awareness of your product through email. Email allows you to stay in contact with past buyers and do so in a segmented way. Segment your customer lists by product type to send relevant updates, show similar add-on SKUs, or send educational emails allowing the user to make the product they have more effective. Think Amazon’s “What’s New with Alexa?” emails If you’re an Echo user.

You should also take this season to spend extra time on ad creative and your brand messaging. Inform all of your new users on what makes your product unique and what your organization stands for. Do you have an interesting founding story? Tell it. If you support non-profits or other organizations? Highlight it. Use what makes your brand special and create grassroots advocates.

Don’t let holiday gifts be the end of your relationship with consumers and create advocates by continuing the conversation through multiple channels.

 

Remarket Add-On Products

Chances are most new customers are coming into your eco-system through your flagship SKU. Use this post-holiday season to remarket companion items to the surge in new customers through Facebook or display advertising. This will help you boost customer lifetime value (LTV) while creating a more enjoyable experience for your customers.

But remember, an effective remarketing campaign is only as good as the data informing it. Create a great product remarketing campaign by using your first-party purchase data to create specific audiences on Facebook, Google, and Pinterest. This will allow you to market add-on items specific to whichever product the customer is currently using.  At Trellis, we’ve developed real-time data feeds for the clients that allow us to bring customer data directly into ad platforms so we can make faster decisions to improve campaign performance.

 

Find Your Most Effective Offers

Most eCommerce businesses are advertising more offers during the holiday shopping season than at any other time of the year. Some of these are proven, and others may be first-time offers. Whatever your case may be, it’s time to dig into the data and find your most effective offers for 2020. 

For example, one Trellis marketing client was rotating weekly promotional offers of current products. This cycle broke when we advertised two popular products as a combination rather than standalone items. The results? Ad clicks and purchases spiked showing the audience had great interest in purchasing these products as a set rather than individually and this combination is now a standard offer in our clients’ online store. 

Don’t forget to look deeper than standard eCommerce KPIs when brainstorming new offer ideas. Social media engagement, PDP bounce rate and other web interaction metrics can all provide insight into customers’ appetite for new offers.

We can finally exhale after the busy season, but it’s no time to rest. Use these three marketing tactics to use the momentum from the holiday season to fuel future growth. Do you have questions about marketing for eCommerce or how to increase traffic to your online store? Contact us to learn more about marketing services offered at Trellis and how we’ve helped brands grow in the past.