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In a world dominated by social media, email is still surprisingly the #1 channel for acquiring new leads. This week Dan and the Bees explore email campaign tactics and real-time messaging that will help amplify your Black Friday and Holiday sales this year!

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What’s New?

At this point, we’re all pretty used to social media always changing, sometimes for the better, and sometimes not so much.

Recently, we had the integration of the Facebook and Instagram messenger, and now Instagram is rolling out some significant API changes. You can read more on it here:

Major Instagram API Changes For Feed Plugins: Here is What You Can Do

Automation is Essential to Your Email Campaign Tactics

Marketing automation is incredibly powerful, focusing on delivering the holy trinity of the right message, right person, and right timing.

Automation makes email more effective and efficient. It can save a ridiculous amount of time and ensure that you don’t miss out on opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

For example, if a customer abandons your shopping cart without making a purchase, you can trigger emails specific to that user and their experience.

Users abandon an average of 69% of carts. The good news is that almost half of abandoned cart emails are opened, and 50% of those people make a purchase.

Email automation is relatively easy to set up and is invaluable to your email marketing tactics.

The below image from Active Campaign shows the flow of email automation from a Black Friday landing page form and how it works.

This automation is triggered when a contact submits your Black Friday opt-in form. They are sent a thank you email with details about how to redeem their offer and then send an email with their discount on the sale day.

You can also:

• Set up A/B testing
• Track responses to collect more information
• Offer discounts strategically
• Create automated drip campaigns
• Personalize your customers’ experiences
• Gather product feedback

The analytics you get from automation can drastically improve your leads’ quality and quantity and help you adjust your tactics to serve your customer base better.

Combine Live Chat With Your Email Campaign Tactics

Email marketing is a proven method for building relationships with your customers. When combined with live chat, it can massively improve your conversion rates and enhance the overall customer experience.

When it comes to consumers’ preference of support channels, live chat beats out email and phone, with 72% of consumers preferring it because of its immediacy.

There’s no waiting in line or trying to navigate a ridiculous menu system, and most issues can be resolved within minutes or even less. What’s not to love?

Live chat is great for getting visitors’ attention, encouraging engagement, creating personalization, and answering basic sales and support questions.

If you don’t have the time or a large enough team to have someone available all the time, chatbots are a great solution. You can check out our blog on chatbots here:

Why Real-Time Messaging & Chatbots are the Key to Unlocking Customer Engagement

Having a live chat set up will help you immensely with your lead generation, marketing automation, and customer service and free up your team to tackle other important tasks.

So if you don’t have one already, you should consider employing a friendly little chatbot to assist you and your team.

SMS Automation Can Be an Untapped Goldmine

Email open rates average at about 15-25%. SMS open rates are closer to about 99%. Yep. You read that right.

Unlike email, SMS has not been wholly abused (yet), with only 38% of contact centers in one study reported using SMS. It’s an excellent opportunity to leverage this channel while it’s still relatively unused by most businesses.

Here is an example of what SMS automation can look like after filling out a form on a PPC landing page. Your phone instantly lights up, buzzes, and says:

“$FNAME Thanks for your interest in $COMPANYNAME, we’ll be calling you soon.”

They followed up and pre-sold the phone call (trying to increase the % of people who opt-in to accepting the first phone call).

If you don’t answer the phone call, here’s what you will receive:

“We were unable to reach you. Click $PHONENUMBER to call us now.”

This is a textbook marketing automation example, where you use conditional IF/Then statements to create different response workflows based on actions they DO or DON’T take.

Examples of Email Campaign Tactics You Can Use Right Now

The type of emails you send to your customers is dependant on who they are, what they’re looking for, and how you can help them, but there are some basic guidelines anyone in any industry can follow.

Here are a few standard examples:

• The Giveaway Email – offer gifts with a minimum purchase amount.
• FOMO Emails – add a countdown timer and last minute deals to attract new and existing customers to check out your sale before it ends.
• Sneak Peek Emails – offer new sale items that align with your customers’ interests; change these items every few hours or days to keep your customers checking back your store for new deals.
• Straight-to-the-Point Emails – use a clear subject line announcing the event or discount and include a call to action that will lead customers to your store.
• Funny and Surprising Emails – use humour in headlines and copy to attract attention memorably or surprisingly.
• Extra discounts Emails – use special VIP discount codes for returning customers and limited discount codes for new customers.

Your subject line can be one of the most important elements of an email and can determine whether or not your email gets opened. If you’re struggling to craft the ultimate subject lines, check out this amazing resource for some helpful insights, examples and tips:

11 Best Networking Email Subject Lines

Remember to keep in mind that people aren’t just looking for things to buy during the holidays – they’re looking for deals.

We get endless emails every day, and this time of year is the one time you can guarantee that people not only want to hear from you but are actively checking their emails daily for new deals.

Segment Your Email Lists

Segmentation is possibly one of the most important components to consider when executing email campaign tactics.

You don’t want to take the shotgun approach and try to reach everyone. You want to narrow down exactly who your audience is and guide these more qualified leads through the funnel.

Ask yourself this: Do you want 1 million impressions and five engagements, or do you want 10,000 impressions and 100 engagements. The point here is that vanity metrics are ultimately useless.

There is no reason to have 1 million prospects on your list that will never be your customer. You want engaged leads who are interested in your brand, which is why you want to segment your lists and use lead scoring to move the right people through the funnel.

You will save a ton of time and resources by targeting individuals who are genuinely interested in what you’re offering.

How to Construct a Promotional Email Marketing Plan

Let’s take a quick look at an example of what a promotional email marketing plan for a webinar would look like and how potential leads are segmented.

You want to segment leads based on behaviour. Every send will refine the leads so that you’re able to deliver more targeted and unique messages.

The goal is to maximize lead conversions through segmentation and targeted messaging.

Once registered, the leads will be provided with three nurturing emails that will reinforce reasons to attend.

Start with an intro offer to pique interest, then use a pain point and solution as a hook for segment 2, and then repeat that with a new pain point and solution for segment 3.

Upon completion, all leads will be messaged, segmented by Attendees and Segments 1,2 and 3. This will reinforce On-Demand and maximize lead conversion opportunities.

It’s Time To Start Thinking Mobile First

You’ve heard it before, especially if you’ve been following these blogs. Don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I would like to come up with a better analogy – that one is just terrible.

These days, more people browse the web, scroll through social media, and check their emails via their mobile devices.

In the past few years, purchases made on mobile devices jumped from about 3% to over 36%. 76% of Black Friday emails and 63% of Cyber Monday emails were opened on a mobile device.

If you’re still not convinced it’s that important, check out these stats:

• Up to 60% of email opens are on mobile, depending on the industry. (Campaign Monitor)
• 75% of Gmail users are using their mobile devices to access their email. (Backlinko)
• 42.3% of consumers will delete an email if it isn’t optimized for mobile. (Backlinko)

These are big numbers, and along with Google’s new mobile-first indexing, if you’re not optimized for mobile, you’ll likely get overlooked.

Personally, that 42.3% bucket is the one I fall into – if I get an email not optimized for mobile, I immediately don’t take the brand seriously. I would rarely do business with them. It just looks unprofessional, lazy, or incompetent, and none of that is a good look.

You want to be relevant and current, or your customers will find someone else who is.

Go Old School With Direct Mail

When considering your email campaign tactics, you can combine with direct mail for great results.

The USPS did a study that showed 60% of direct mail recipients would ALSO visit a website being promoted on the piece.

It turns out; the old snail mail can provide an exciting way to sidestep the cluttered battleground that is your prospect’s inbox.

Even old school tactics like direct mail are getting treated to an overhaul, courtesy of players like Lob that allow you to trigger new campaigns through an API.

You supply all the content and creativity ahead of time and automatically manage to create, coordinate, and deliver each piece. It’s pretty awesome.

You can use custom referring domains to track when new site visits occur based on offline activities. And you can use custom 800-numbers and set-up tools like CallRail (through their convenient Kissmetrics integration) to manage notoriously difficult phone calls.

Drive Engagement With In-App Notifications

Push notifications can drive growth and increase engagement by up to 88%. With 42% of mobile users choosing to keep push notifications enabled on their device, these alerts can become essential in your marketing strategy.

They can be an effective way to reach your audience in real-time and be a great way to retain your audience over more extended periods.

In-app messaging can allow you to trigger messages and notifications based on what users are doing (or not doing) inside your app, providing a great way to drive engagement.

Some of the main benefits of push notifications include:

• Direct access to your audience without them even needing to be in your app or on your site.
• Real-time traffic on your apps and sites, which helps with the virality of content and boosting reach even more.
• Urgent and timely notifications also make your app the go-to source for information subscribers can use on the fly.
• New product launches or content that users wouldn’t otherwise have noticed.
• Social networks benefit from this continual push of activity back to the app.
• Effectively help increase ad revenue by getting more people to see your pages containing ads.
• Increase eCommerce sales, with messages more specifically targeted at shoppers.
• You can learn a lot about what your audience likes and doesn’t like, through analyzing the data, allowing you to adjust your marketing strategies going forward.

And that’s a wrap

If you’d like to dig deeper into email campaign tactics, check out these great resources we 💖!

12 Best Email Marketing Tools to Dominate Inboxes in 2020 – An awesome resource from Mobile Monkey where they narrow down more than 500 email marketing tools on the market to make up the best suite of email marketing software from email capture to inbox delivery.

How to Automatically Nurture Customers With Different Channels – Marketing automation can deliver an unbelievable 451% new qualified leads and 34% increase in sales. This article addresses this and much more.

Active Campaign Black Friday Toolkit (Download) – Just 1 piece of this Black Friday Toolkit could boost your sales by 10%. There are 7. Check it out.

8 Excellent Black Friday Cyber Monday Emails to Inspire Your Own Campaigns – It can be difficult to come up with great marketing emails with eye-catching images and actionable copy. check out the link for some sweet inspiration.

Using SMS and Email to Engage Your Customers in 2020 – SMS combined with email creates a seamless customer communication experience that’s reliable, scalable, and downright powerful. Read on for more insights.

Holiday Email Marketing Tips 2020-2021 by Email Experts – A collection of great examples for holiday emails to inspire your email marketing tactics!

AND…some more tools to use!

https://www.carts.guru/
https://apps.shopify.com/smsbump
https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-email
https://activecampaign.com
https://simpletexting.com/