How to Leverage CRM Email Marketing During The Busy Holiday Season

The holiday season is about to kick in. While the shopping madness brings with it hectic schedules and crazy work hours, it is indisputably the most lucrative time of the year for businesses across industry verticals.

In fact, according to the US National Retail Foundation, a sudden and consistent spike in sales volumes can be seen during these last three months, year after year. As a result, most businesses generate a whopping 30% of their sales just in this brief window!

Naturally, then, you’d want to capitalize on this trend to optimize your revenue. And what better way to do that than offering your target customer base exactly what they are on the lookout for? 

Critical insights gathered through CRM (customer relationship management) systems have been known to improve the customer experience for 74% of businesses using them. Email marketing remains 40 times more effective than other channels of digital marketing such as Twitter and Facebook combined.

So, why not use pointed data insights to create targeted marketing messages and deliver them to your audience through the most effective channel? That’s where CRM email marketing comes in.

We tell you what it is and how you can leverage it to generate more sales this holiday season:

What is CRM Email Marketing?

CRM email marketing means tapping into the functionalities of a CRM system to create highly timely, personalized, and professional email templates and maximize their outreach. It marries well with the goal of gaining an edge over your competitors by reaching potential buyers at a time and in a manner that is most likely to get them to act on your CTA.

This can be achieved by basing your email marketing campaigns on the data gathered by the CRM – gender, age, purchase preferences, website history, time spent, and so on.

Benefits of CRM Email Marketing

Given the strong ROI of email marketing, it makes sense to capitalize on its outreach and effectiveness. Here is how CRM email marketing helps you do that:

• It helps you create highly customized email templates based on user data, thus, enhancing their appeal to the readers.
• You can build a customized communication journey using CRM email marketing, which means your subscribers view your emails as a source of valuable information and not generic spam messages.
• The pre-designed email templates in CRM systems enable you to create messages with a high visual appeal with minimal effort.
• CRM email marketing is also helpful in keeping the design responsive for different email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, and so on, as well as different devices such as smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

7 Ways to Leverage CRM Email Marketing During The Busy Holiday Season

Using CRM and email marketing in tandem is most crucial during a busy time such as the holiday season. It will help you create messages that stand out from the crowd and do so with minimal investment of time and effort. At a time when competition is high, businesses are shooting emails for every possible use case,  and your team members need time off to be with family and friends, CRM email marketing can be an invaluable tool.

Here are 7 ways you can leverage CRM email marketing optimally during the busy holiday season:

1. Update Your Lists

For email marketing to be effective during the holiday season, it should not only be timely but also relevant. Don’t let outdated or low-quality email lists hold you back. Before you start working on your first campaign, take the time to clean up your list. Use insights from your CRM system to remove duplicate and hard bounce addresses.

If the number of inactive subscribers outweighs the responsive ones, use CRM insights to create a targeted pre-holiday email campaign to get them excited about your offerings. Then, build upon this momentum once the holiday season sets in.

2. Run Targeted Campaigns

Integrated CRM email marketing is sought after because it helps you gather key details about your user base and then use this information to create tailored email messages. So, make sure you are tapping into it to run targeted campaigns for your users during the holiday season.

For instance, if you run a retail business for adventure sports, start by adding an ‘interests’ field to your CRM. Then, tap into this pool of user-generated data to send your subscribers emails related to their area of interest. For instance, if a user enjoys snowboarding, sending them emails about ski gear would be futile. Segmenting these users and creating a snowboarding-related campaign for them instead will improve your conversion rate manifold.

Similarly, if you are an ecommerce company, you can segment your list based on the amount a customer spends on your platform per year or during the holiday season, and design a different workflow for each segment.  

3. Tap into Templated Emails

Use your CRM to set up real-time visitor tracking on your website, and then, use these alerts to make relevant recommendations based on their activity. Use templated emails to send out timely promo codes or special holiday deals to nudge them to make a purchase with a single click. This serves the dual purpose of creating customized content without losing precious time.

4. Turn Visits into Purchases

When you browse through a website or app, any product that you click on is often followed by a ‘frequently bought together’, ‘you may also like’, ‘user who bought this, also bought’ sections. Why not leverage the user data in your CRM to replicate this approach in your email marketing as well.

Let’s say, you are an apparel retailer from whom a customer has just bought a pair of jeans. Plugging more pants options is not likely to yield results because the likelihood of them making a repeat purchase so soon is low. Instead, if you promote boots, coats, or pullovers that ‘complete the look’, they are more likely to act on your suggestion, especially when they are excited about shopping during the holiday season.

5. Automate Follow Up Tasks

Repeating the same tasks often gets in the way of generating and converting leads through email marketing during the busy holiday season. Free up your already strained team’s time by automating tasks that have to be repeated for every new visitor, subscriber, or a potential buyer. For instance, you can automate essential workflows such as welcome emails that have to be sent out to every new subscriber. Similarly, cart abandonment is a common issue that all businesses grapple with. So, the process of sending emails containing promo codes or special discounts when a user abandons a purchase can also be automated.

The leads generated this holiday season can be nurtured in the next and the one after that by creating an automated workflow that segments your seasonal buyers into a dedicated list.

6. Prioritize Customer Retention

Your loyal, returning customers are your biggest asset. Since the holiday season is the time when sales and promotions both see a spike, you must leverage your CRM email marketing to build upon the experience of this segment of customers. Use the data on returning customers to create a targeted email campaign for them, rewarding them for their loyalty to your brand with special discounts and exclusive offers. Seek their feedback, be responsive to their queries, and grievances to keep your sales booming during and after the holiday season.

7. Set Up a Schedule

Before you launch your email marketing campaign, go over the calendar, and mark all the important days. Then, set up a schedule for the ones you want to capitalize on. Of course, you’d want to target popular ones such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Based on the demographic profile of your mailing list, also capitalize on less prominent holidays such as Green Sunday, Veteran’s Day, Hanukkah, and Small Business Saturday. But don’t overdo it, as the risk of email fatigue is very real during this time of the year.

The Takeaway

There’s a lot to be done ahead of and during the holiday season. You can give your efforts a clear direction and control their outcome more decisively by simply leveraging CRM email marketing.

At Email Uplers, we provide you with an established ecosystem to help you automate every html email campaign – on or off the holiday season. Visit this link to learn more about what’s in store for you!