Add A Mailing List To Increase Sales This Holiday Season

‘Tis the Season

As the weather gets colder, the days get shorter and we start thinking about what our personal holiday plans are. The time is right to get on top of your holiday marketing. With the holiday season comes crazy holiday offers from your favorite stores and an influx of emails to help push those offers. As an individual, you may get excited over all the great deals from the companies you love or frustrated with having to keep up on cleaning out your inbox. As a business or brand, you should only be ecstatic about the potential for insane sales, growth of your brand, and widening of your customer base.

“Email is responsible for 20% of online holiday site visits.”
via Tech Crunch

Whether your business is 100% online or runs out of a physical location, one of the easiest strategies for leveraging the holiday season is to set up a mailing list on your site and increase your marketing efforts to promote it. With an increase in online traffic and consumers interested in your offers, this 2-month period can greatly increase your brand’s customer base, not only during this time but throughout the entire year. Incorporate this into your marketing strategies and you will reap the benefits for months to come.

Reasons/Benefits

It’s simple: the holiday season is the peak sales season of the year. More emails go out during the holiday season, and people open emails more often this time of year than any. People are expecting these emails and are ready to pounce on what you send them. Here are some statistics to entice you:

1. Black Friday sees the highest number of opens and links clicked throughout the whole year, with Thanksgiving in second.
2. Email is responsible for 20% of online holiday site visits. 
3. Consumers who purchase products they received through email spend 138% more than people who do not receive emails.
4. 59% of people said marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.

Use Your Website to Leverage Your List

To get started, you will need 2 things:

1. An email marketing service
2. A mailing list signup on your website

Setting Up Your Mailing List on Your Website

Once you have your email provider chosen and set up, you can move forward with getting your sign-up form added to your website. Whether you’re enlisting the help of a developer or doing it yourself, the great part of choosing a solid email marketing provider is that they all supply easy to embed sign-up forms that you can include anywhere on your website.

We recommend having a sign-up button that takes you to the form or the form itself accessible from the bottom of every page on your website. We have seen great success there. If a customer is interested in your products and reads the content you have provided on that page of interest, they will likely be enticed to sign up when they’ve reached the end of that page. It is the perfect place.

In addition, here are some other places that you may want to consider adding your sign-up form.

• On your homepage
• In a popup that shows after the user has been on your website for a set period of time
• In a floating bar that appears at the top or bottom of the website (This can be less intrusive to the user than a full-screen popup.)
• On each blog article

Once you have added the sign-up to your website, you are ready to start collecting emails and growing your list! You’ve done it! From here, you can send whatever emails you want to your customers, from sales to resources and helpful information. However, the main goal of this article is to help you take advantage of the holiday season to increase sales and visitors to your brand. In the next section, we’ll outline some great ways to use your new email list to do this.

10 Great Ways to Leverage Your List During the Holidays

Not all strategies work for every business, so read this list and pick the different ideas that can work for you and your brand goals.

1. Deals! Deals! Deals! – With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and other consumer-centric dates coming up, the best way to increase sales is to inform your customers of the deals and products you want to push. Be sure to offer a deal that even you could not resist.
2. Free Holiday Resources – A list of helpful reminders, a holiday gift guide, or a brand-specific way to help your customers can make them feel appreciative of your brand.
3. Customer Appreciation – Show your customers you and your staff are grateful for them. Whether that is with a few words or a nice discount is up to you.
4. Promote Gift Certificates – This is another great way to improve sales!
5. Promote Your Holiday Services – Some service businesses thrive during the holidays. If that sounds like you, do not forget to showcase your service.
6. Last-Minute Offers – Last-minute shopping sound familiar? A recent Reuters report claimed that sales in the week leading up to December 24^th have risen 6.5% year-over-year. Help these procrastinators out!
7. Company Announcement – Don’t just stick to sales and promotion emails. Promote your brand itself and get people engaged by creating an announcement or personalized email to remind your list of the company behind the email.
8. Celebrate With Your Customers – Whether the holidays are busy for your business or not, a simple holiday greeting can go a long way in making your customers stay connected.
9. Holiday Giveaway and Contests – Announce a season-long giveaway for mailing list subscribers. This is a great way to get people to sign up. They’ll be entered in the contest, and you’ll get to send them lots of emails!
10. Talk About What’s Trendy – Everyone loves a good trend. Discuss a trending product or service you can offer.

Wrapping It Up

If you do not already have a list, now is the time to start. With so many great marketing holidays and opportunities throughout the next 2 months, you can only benefit from starting now. With a little effort, your sales can increase in the short-term and you can continue to grow your list over the years to come. Good luck!