How's your holiday planning shaping up?
We assume many of you are doing last minute post card printing or are just about to mail out the invitations for November's pre-holiday store events. There are lots of last minute media buys being offered for strategic newspaper and local magazine and advertising.
What's happening with your online stuff? Have you planned your website content yet? Website theme? Email marketing strategies? Suffice it to say we've thrown a lot of ideas at you in the past 35 days, but if you've not taken any action yet you will miss the season.
Today we're going to throw more actionable email marketing ideas at you. As usual, these ideas are based off successful campaigns from previous years.
Let's start with emails focusing on upcoming events. You might have a few important events in the next few weeks and in December that need mentioning, so how would you do that in an email campaign?
First: Review your off-line marketing you are already planning for those events. Are you about to mail out a post card for a Ladies Night? It should be easy to include that same post card image in an email. You would direct the email recipient to the event RSVP page on your website. Oh, don't forget to put the post card on your website home page with a link to the RSVP as well.
Any event email invitation you send should have a telling subject line similar to these:
"Save This Date - An Invitation to Our Special Event"
"Save This Date - An Invitation to Our Private Event"
"A Private Invitation to Our Special Event on 11/11/11"
"Naughty & Nice Event Invitation"
The body of an event invitation should only include the invitation. Do not try to sell anything in this email.
This might sound silly, but you need to make a checklist of what should be in each of your emails, and actually cross reference that list during your email review process.
Here's a checklist for an event email:
1. Date of event
2. Purpose of event
3. Full description or a link to a web page with full description
4. Location of event
5. Duration of event
6. RSVP method (email reply, link to website form, link to Facebook event page)
7. RSVP deadline
8. What's expected of the attendee (dress code, leave the wallet at home, bring a gift, bring a friend)
9. Appropriate disclaimer that they opted-in for this email
10. Your name and email address as the sender.
11. Directions how they can unsubscribe.
As we said, each email you put together should be reviewed by more than just yourself. Show it to at least one more person in your store. All good marketing is reviewed by more than one person before launching. Please don't trust yourself to catch punctuation mistakes or homonym mistakes. Another person might also be able to shorten a 10 word sentence into a more concise 7 word sentence.
If you don't have anyone else available then put all your effort into the email and save your work for later review. Do something else for at least a few hours or even wait until tomorrow before looking at it again. If you're lucky, you might even have better inspiration during this "away time" so make sure to write those inspirations for later. When you finally do get back to it, you will more easily be able to see mistakes you would have missed in your previous haste.
Over the next few days we're going to review some suggestions for other types of holiday emails to help spur your thoughts.
Please let us know if you used any of our ideas and the end results. We love the feedback on our Facebook page and directly on the jWAG.biz website.
Oh, one final announcement -- We usually send out these Daily Golden Nuggets at 2PM every weekday. Assuming everything works as planned over this weekend, starting Monday you will be receiving these in the morning from now on. Thanks for being a subscriber!
