Santa's Agile Workshop: Building Holiday Email Marketing Plans for Christmas Success

Santa's workshop continues to deliver gifts year after year by keeping its eyes on a tight delivery date and remaining scalable to a growing customer base. In other words, Santa has clearly understood the importance of sustainability and agility in an evolving market. Granted Santa doesn’t have to worry about marketing per se, but you can still learn a lot from Santa’s agile workshop to create a successful holiday email marketing strategy. 

By adopting holiday B2B marketing strategies in real-time, just like Santa’s workshop, you can leverage this “old school” approach to meet your holiday goals.

The Legend Continues

Much like the mystique of Santa’s workshop has kept naughty kids nice for centuries, email marketing has continued to keep disengaged customers engaged for decades. In other words, they’ve both been around a long time because they work.

Santa’s workshop is built on his fail-proof wish list, timing, and a consistent brand message. It boils down to nothing more than genius branding and personalization. The same can be said for email marketing. Unlike SEO or social media, email marketing isn't driven by ever-changing algorithms, but instead by your audience, the timing, and the message. By embracing these basics, you can develop your holiday email campaign and see results using a proven marketing method.

Like Santa’s workshop, email marketing is still a concept that is still very much alive and well. As an opt-in marketing tool, you’ll tend to see better results and satisfaction from people who have chosen to receive information from you. If you keep your content relevant, you can continue to resonate with your audience. And this is where agile marketing comes in. You overcome relevance problems by creating smaller, more specific segments, and contextualize content so your email campaigns become more targeted.

Does Email Marketing Work During Holidays?

Agile email marketing works during the holidays because it streamlines your process and constantly enhances the subscriber experience. By feeding leads and customers with useful information that makes holiday purchases easier, you keep them engaged in real-time. You can identify specific pain points for your segments so you speak to them using the right language and relevant offers that will resonate with them in the moment.

Also, through pre-holiday testing, you can fine-tune your segments and the language they prefer to create inclusive, informational, innovative email content. Some holiday email marketing examples include:

• Keeping things inclusive while embracing the holiday spirit using generic wording such as Seasons Greetings or Happy Holidays
• Mentioning holiday stress and how you might be able to help alleviate it or at least empathize with them
• Including incentives to engage with your emails and brand such as improving their finances, managing taxes, streamlining processes as a New Year’s resolution, etc.
• Using a time-limited holiday offer
• Reflecting on specific ways you helped customers throughout the year based on their purchase habits

Holiday Email Marketing Strategy

You can take some notes from Santa’s agile playbook to improve your holiday email marketing efforts, including:

Like Santa, you need to keep your list up to date.

Santa keeps production agile by only providing gifts to kids who place their orders via a letter. You can adopt this premise to become more agile, by keeping your email list updated. Weed out all bounced email addresses and continue to solicit opt-in with a clear unsubscribe button.

Keep things on schedule based on a Santa “countdown.”

Santa meets his deadline every year based on a tried-and-true countdown. Your drip campaign needs an effective schedule that feeds content to your customers in manageable bites, so you remain top of mind without becoming annoying (Annoyed people tend to unsubscribe). This is easier using an agile marketing platform. You also want to ensure you aren’t being blocked by email service providers by “spamming” subscribers with constant emails.

Leverage context by predicting what people want.

While Santa asks what kids want via letters or a visit to the local mall, you can understand what customers want via their actions or legs of the customer journey. Context provides opportunities to send out specific messages in reaction to something a customer does. Did they click on a blog with specific information? Send them a link to something more in-depth. Did someone just sign up for emails? Send them a holiday-themed welcome. Has a lack of activity shown a loss of interest? Use this as your cue to send out a special offer.

Base content on a wish list.

Back to Santa’s wish list, you can ensure people receive information that interests them by using a checklist when people subscribe. This ensures they remain engaged and don’t get bored by emails that don’t resonate with them or help meet a need. Agile marketing provides a constantly evolving list of topics that speak to what is most important to customers in real-time.

Focus on customer behaviour.

Santa’s naughty and nice list is a hard nod to the power of behaviour. Holiday email marketing is focused on behavioural marketing, advanced segmentation, targeted content for enhanced personalization, and perfectly timed drip campaigns. Your team can send emails using automation leveraging real-time data that informs your content decisions and share information when a customer needs it most.

Adopt teamwork to improve efficiency.

Santa’s elves all work together to get things out consistently, on time, and fully branded. Agile email marketing is all about teamwork, and breaking down silos that can hold things up. Using a team-based, multitasking process improves workflows so team members can pivot to contribute their talents. Agile marketing constantly improves email purpose via context, fine-tuning audiences to leverage personalization and using proven design and creative frameworks that tend to resonate best with each segment. 

Your analytics team should constantly share this information so your creative team understands new segments, successful designs and how they can improve customer experience through their email drip campaigns.

To wrap it all up (sorry we couldn’t resist) agile holiday email marketing:

• Simplifies your processes.
• Keeps your team focused on improving methodologies.
• Provides increasingly more accurate segments.
• Allows you to target your messaging in real time based on customer behaviour.

ThinkFuel uses an agile pricing model where you subscribe to a monthly bucket of credits which provides you with flexible mix-and-match marketing services. It also ensures we quickly adapt to maximize the ROI within the agreed-upon budget. Click here to speak to a marketing strategist to get a jump on the holiday rush.