Sacramento, California (PRWEB) November 04, 2013
StreamSend, a leading email marketing service provider and creator of the enhanced social marketing tool suite StreamSend Share 2.0, guides businesses on how to make the most of their holiday email and social marketing.
For many businesses, the holidays can be a make-or-break time of year, with up to half of their yearly sales coming during November and December, said Dan Forootan, president of StreamSend Email Marketing. Recognizing the importance of this period, we work hard with clients to help them use a balance of email and social and smart techniques that let them best connect with customers looking to buy during the holiday season. Here are some steps to make the holidays a time for businesses to celebrate this year.
1. Holiday Emails A Marketing Must
Email still leads online conversions and is a critical holiday e-commerce tool. Before customers start focusing on their shopping lists, business need to focus on their customer lists and how to leverage these established connections. First, that means respecting that customers are on the fly more than ever during the holidays and reaching them effectively means making it easy, shaping email messages that are instantly recognizable, get to the point and provide a clear call to action.
2. Mobile: Reach the Moving Target
The mobile revolution has roared into the mainstream and shows no signs of stopping. Almost half of those email messages are now opened on mobile devices, so a mobile-friendly design is more important than ever. Messages should be an easy read, whether on a desktop, mobile phone or tablet. Particularly during the holidays, customers are a moving target: reach them wherever they are. Mobile-friendly templates offer a way to keep thoughts short and succinct.
3. Social: Reach, Read and Research
Businesses also need to sharpen up their social presence during the holidays and keep the conversation going, whether its posting a special deal, rewarding loyal customers, answering questions or addressing complaints. Consumers turn to resources they trust to inform their gift-buying holiday shopping; its a great time to reach them with the information they want. Those same consumers are doing their homework, too, though, so businesses need to keep up not just with online review and listing sites, but with social networks like Facebook to acknowledge and respond to comments. A holiday pin board can suggest items, and then be emailed out to lists or even an RSS right from a store.
4. Celebrate Holidays Locally
The holidays are a great time for businesses to use email, social and other online resources to reach out to local communities and build lasting, profitable relationships while strengthening local economies. Here are two organizations that can help local, independent businesses connect with their communities:
Small Business Saturday is a national initiative to help local merchants compete during the critical holiday shopping season and aims to drive shoppers to local small merchants the Saturday following Thanksgiving. More than 100 million Americans shopped small on Small Business Saturday last year, while more than 230 organizations endorsed the initiative. See Facebook.com/shopsmall.
Shift Your Shopping is a joint effort through the holiday season led by the New England Local Business Forum, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and AMIBA. It aims to build an annual tradition that strengthens local economies, expands employment, nurtures a sense of community, and provides a more relaxed, fun, and rewarding gift-buying experience. ShiftYourShopping.org
5. Holiday Special Offers & Coupons
Whether its a discount, freebie, incentive, free shipping, or special packaging, holiday deals and special offers are business traditions during the holidays, for good reason. Businesses need to fight to stand out during the holiday frenzy and emerge from the crowd with an offer that is compelling, profitable and targeted — leveraging the knowledge gained from email lists and customer relationship history. Its the time of year to use email and social to offer goodwill with gifts and extra help, cementing relationships in the process of selling. And businesses can get quick turnaround with techniques like sending expiration-dated email offers that can be printed out for a coupon.
Find out more about how to use email and social to send greetings that attract customers and build business through the holidays and year-round, visit: http://www.streamsend.com/KESH1PW.
StreamSend
StreamSend offers an easy-to-use, affordable and reliable email marketing service designed to help businesses maximize the reach of their marketing budget when sending an email newsletter or using Social Media. StreamSend offers a number of industry-leading standard pricing plans, private-label and affiliate programs and hands-on personal client service. Started in 1998, StreamSend is a leader in Email Marketing.