Thanksgiving Day is around the corner, and so are the two biggest shopping days of the season - Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Marking the start of holiday bonanza, the significance of each of these days lies in the fact that they provide ample sale opportunities to online businesses, and at the same time enables customers to enjoy substantial discounts on their purchases. According to the Adobe's Digital Index, total online sales on Cyber Monday rose 16 percent from 2014 to $3.07 billion in 2015. Going by the stats, it won't be wrong to expect a massive rise even in 2016.
With few days left for the showdown, marketers and sellers are ready with their strategies and plan to make things work in their favor this holiday season. And to do so their most powerful tool is email marketing that can help them drive online sales with engaging and unique content. But the journey towards successfully capturing prospects, attracting them to the website, getting them converted and generating sales leads via email campaigns is not a matter of joke. To stay ahead of the competition, marketers need to create an email that will portray their products with lucrative offers in the best possible way, being different from others.
Here are nine easy steps that can make marketer's job easier and help them in designing attractive email templates that will allure customers to visit the site and keep clicking on the buy now button.
1. Use Video to Decorate
Emails act as representatives of your brand as audience receiving them see you through it on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Hence creating stylish email templates to leave a good impression on your clients is necessary on your part. You can make use of video templates designed by professionals to make it eye-catchy. For making such videos even more useful, a sign-up form can be embedded into it so that people can opt-in for receiving such visual creative pieces. Also, don't forget to keep the option for viewers to share or forward your video on various platforms. Apart from the visual content, a URL attached to the video can help attract more visitors and thus increase website traffic.
2. Keep Tracking
To know whether you are doing things in the right way or not is important. One just cannot be blindly creating templates without knowing how they are performing in real scenarios. So keep making use of advanced reporting to track the success of your email, social, and video campaigns from a central dashboard.
3. Make it Flexible
While designing the email template, keep one thing in mind that it should be generic so that it can be of multipurpose use, for example, can be used as a Facebook tab, a web page and even as a landing page. By making the template flexible to be viewed in any form, you ensure that your audience never misses your content.
4. Go for Triggered-based Emails
To boost the open rates of your email campaigns, go for trigger-based emails that are relevant to the customers send at the right time. Once you have a list of engaged customers, don't stop at that and try to re-target them to make that extra effort needed to influence their purchasing decision.
5. Engaging Content
The content of your email should address customer pinpoints. Besides being meticulously crafted, it should look appealing as well as must serve some purpose for the audience. By creating dynamic content for emails and landing pages in this holiday season, you can grab more attention and can be unique. Send geo-targeted campaigns to reach up to your prospects with a perfect message.
6. Have Option for Customization
Email templates can take personalization to the next level by allowing marketers to customize templates for each type of customer. For instance, the business email one sends to retail clients can be made different from that of the one sent to wholesale customers. Also, have customizable sign-up forms in the templates to better capture and manage lead capturing forms.
7. Test Your Creation
Before sending it to customers, make sure that you test the final product of your efforts. Take screenshots to see how your emails will appear in multiple email clients, be it with an image or without it. Don't forget to test it through spam filters, ensuring that your message doesn't end up being in the spam box.
8. Make it a Click-away Affair
Organizing your work is as necessary as doing it in the right way. The mobile-optimized emails and social templates you create have to be well organized and should be updated from time to time to avoid loopholes in the process. And to do so, what one can do is create an image library to keep a record what's happening.
9. Be a Social Charmer
The best shopping time of the year are here and so is the best selling time. If one needs to boost their online sales, then reaching as many customers as possible is mandatory. The more you advertise, the more are your chances to get noticed and thus expect to see better ROI. For increasing the customer base, one needs to share their content on various social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Twitter that too from a centralized location to maintain uniformity in what your prospects are reading about you.
