Holiday Emails and Effective Customer Relationship Management

As we have stated in past issues of Industrial Web Talk, email is still one of the most effective and cost efficient forms of keeping your business in the minds of your customers. There is no better time to drop them a quick note than the holiday season.

Using the end of the year to gather your list of customers into an organized, usable format will pay dividends throughout 2008. Using email to keep your customers informed and motivated is one of the most cost-effective marketing initiatives available, and starting the process in preparation for the upcoming year puts you in a perfect position to grow.

Defining Your Holiday Goals:
What Your Email Should Achieve

As with any properly run marketing campaign you can only know how well you are doing if you set clearly defined goals. The holiday time is a busy time for everyone so keep your offer or message simple and easy to respond to. Here are some suggestions:

1. Clear out some stock items by offering a limited time discount.
2. Announce your products or services lineup for the New Year and tie them into performance goals and decisions you know to be important to your customer base.
3. Host a Holiday Event that brings together key customers and your sales force.
4. Thank your customers for their continued loyalty and offer them an opportunity to sign-in to a "members only" section of your website to take advantage of a limited time special offer or to accept a Free gift.
5. Reach out to customers you haven't heard from in a while by offering a discount or Free gift.

Whatever your desired business goals, the key to a successful campaign is to:

1. Keep the offer simple:

First of all, you want to keep your recipients focused and paying attention so they will respond quickly. Avoid long sales pitches and detailed product descriptions. Use bulleted points and clear, highly relevant titles so your customers can scan the email quickly for relevancy. Secondly, a simple offer is easier for you to track results. The response rate may offer you valuable insight into the demand for that particular product or service, allowing you to modify it if necessary to better fulfill the needs of your customers, not to mention that it can provide excellent feedback for the New Year!

2. Speak to the needs of your recipients:

Ensure that your offer is specifically tailored to the particular customer group who will be receiving it. If you are not in the practice of segmenting your customer lists then this is a good time to start. By tracking the purchasing behavior of your customers over time you can understand what they typically buy and when. You will also have a pretty good idea of why they are buying it too. Target your offer, including all benefits and features, to everything you know about the purchasing behavior of each of your customer groups. They are most likely to respond if they can visualize your solution fulfilling their need. Remember: the end of the year can be a great time to boost interest, sales, and your bottom line!

3. Create a sense of urgency by putting a time limit on your offer:

The sense of urgency comes from two things: 1) how your offer will improve their lives and 2) the fact that they can get that solution now at a discount. You have to paint a clear picture of how you will make their life better, or as is more often the case, provide them with a way to do better whatever it is they do.

4. Personalize the message:

If you are able to address emails directly to recipients and talk about something you know to be important to them or mention something they took advantage of in the recent past then they are more likely to respond. Any way that you can let your customers know that you are listening to their needs and responding with valuable solutions sets the tone for trust and reliability. You want them to regard you as the "go to" company because you prove over and over again that you know them, understand them and give them valuable solutions that fit how they do things and produce desired results.

5. Provide an easy to follow and clear-cut "Call-to-Action":

Let them know what you expect them to do next: make a purchase, fill in a form, sign-in to the "members only" area of a website or some other action. Let them know exactly what they will be expected to do.

6. Create a targeted landing page that fulfills the expectation of the email:

The landing page needs to fulfill the expectation you established in the email. If you are offering a discounted item then that is what they should see when they arrive at the landing page. You will carefully guide your customer respondent through to conversion by laying out the path of clicks and instructions.

7. Track results and measure your success:

By tracking your results you are able to measure the success of your clearly defined goal, tying results directly to the response of your targeted customer list and their response to your simple offer.

Staying in consistent communication with your customers is a valuable business practice. Email is an affordable and efficient means of letting your customers know you are committed to providing them with products and services that fulfill their business needs and may in fact improve the way they do things. It helps you to keep your business and what you offer at the top of the list of possibilities of your active customers and to remind inactive customers how you have successfully helped them in the past.

The holiday season is rapidly approaching and there is no better time to prepare your contact lists. Not only can you use it to send good tidings for the holidays, but you can increase sales and have a great communication method for 2008 and beyond.

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