On a recent Email Marketing Today podcast, we discussed ideas and strategies for holiday email campaigns. Chad White, the author of The Retail Email Blog, was our special guest and we talked to him about his latest guide “The Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season”.
One of the many issues we discussed was the 12 days (or however many days you decide to run with) holiday series and how the sudden shift in email frequency could actually hurt your list. There is a big opportunity for those subscribers that are interested, but for those that unexpectedly begin to receive emails on a daily basis, when they are used to weekly or longer time frame between messages, you could end up with those contacts unsubscribing from your list… or worse affecting your deliverability by clicking the report as spam button.
A better way to approach this situation is to give control back to your subscribers. Allow them to decide if they would like to opt into the 12 days of Christmas series. This could be done in a creative message teasing or hinting at some of the exclusive offers that may be presented in these emails with a call to action to click through on a link if they would like to receive the holiday messaging.
For Listrak users, this can all be automated using Listrak Conductor. Let’s take a look at what the beginning of this conversation might look like (click the image to see the full size):
In the first trigger we enter all of the contacts on our list. Next, we have a wait step that will hold all of the contacts until the set date and time of 11/23 at 9am. On this time and date we’ll continue on to send the 12 Days of Christmas Invitation Email. In this email we tease the 12 days of Christmas sale and let our customers know the only way you will see these deals is to let us know by clicking this link.
Next we have another wait step. This is important because it will hold our contacts until they click the link. If they don’t click the link by 10/1, the wait will expire and the contacts will exit the conversation.
If they do click through on our link, the “Clicked Link or Filled Out Web Form” trigger would fire. We could also have a web form on our site that new contacts could fill out in order to enter the conversation and receive the 12 Days of Christmas email series. Once this trigger fires contacts are moved into the “Wait until 12/1/2009 @ 9:00 AM” step.
The first 12 Days of Christmas email will be sent on 12/1. The rest of the series is a simple over time thread. Each message in the series is preceded by a wait step that will wait until the correct day to send the message.
There are unlimited possibilities with event triggered and automated conversations which can understandably make it overwhelming to decide where to start. Over the next few weeks we are planning to start a Listrak Conductor webinar series that will focus on specific examples like this one and walk through all of the steps to set it up. In the first one, we’ll walk through setting up the 12 days of Christmas series step by step. We’ll also be taking your Listrak Conductor questions at that time in order to help point you in the right direction. I’ll post an update here once we have finalized a date and time for the first webinar.
Do you have an event triggered scenario or an automated workflow that you would like us to discuss in the webinar series? If so, email me your ideas to bshroyer@listrak.com and we’ll attempt to work them in. As always, if you have any questions, our support staff is ready to help! Email them at support@listrak.com.
** UPDATE **
You can now sign up for the “How to Automate a Drip Campaign” webinar where I will demonstrate setting up the holiday email campaign using Listrak Conductor. You can register for either of these dates:
Thursday, October 1, 2009 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
or
Thursday, October 8, 2009 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
