I don’t know about you, but this year I feel bombarded by Christmas discounts.
Sellers often think that they’ve built up enough goodwill by mailing regularly (but not too often) the rest of the year to allow them to bombard their users with discounts during on the run up to Christmas.
However, during December your customers could be receiving several emails a day that are exactly like the emails you’re sending. And if you keep sending them, there’s a good chance that your subscribers will lump your emails in with the rest of them and simply hit ‘delete’.
A customer isn’t just for Christmas
The long-term relationship you have with your customer has to come first. Instead of trying to maximise your gains from your holiday sales in the short term, aim to maximise your long-term customer value.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to sell your products during the holidays. You should. But don’t do it at the expense of your relationship with your customers.
Email only two or three times maximum during the run up to Christmas. Send enough mailings that you let your customer base know about your offers, but don’t try to pressure them into buying.
Making your products stand out
If everyone is receiving multiple sales emails every day, the answer is not to mail them even more often to try and get sales. Instead, try to make your offer stand out.
Ask yourself why they signed up for your email list or purchased your products in the first place.
If you’re selling jeans, they might have signed up because they want to look great. If you run a website for work at home mums, they might have signed up because they want to make more money.
Identify what the core desire of your market is, then try to tailor your offers to that core desire. Instead of just discounting, try to come up with more creative offers that stand out.
Tailor offer around past purchases
Instead of just mailing all your customers with the same offer, try to segregate your list based on products they’ve purchased in the past. Then send offers based on what people have bought in the past. Whether this is possible for you or not will depend on how you have set up your mailing list. So if you can’t currently do this, it may be worth looking at the information you gather on your clients so you have the option to do it in future.
Ideally, this should give you a higher conversion rate as well as a lower unsubscribe rate.
So there you go, three ways of making the best of the run up to Christmas without annoying your customers.
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