Santa might not get you everything you want, but email marketing sure will.
If you’re a marketer reading this, you must be pumped up about the holiday season. Your customers are in a festive mood and are not shying away from spreading love, generosity, and presents.
Make the most of America’s favorite holiday by sending well-designed Christmas emails. This article reveals the best-kept industry knowledge for creating high-converting emails that will achieve all your Christmas targets.
Why Should You Send Christmas Emails?
You’ve planned to offer limited-time discounts on your retail outlets and to launch a festive campaign across all your social media channels. With so much happening already, should you really send Christmas emails?
The answer is a big YES. Christmas email marketing is your best shot for achieving a profitable season.
Total holiday sales during November and December 2024 are expected to rise between 2.5% and 3.5% compared to 2023. This results in a forecasted amount of $979.5—$989 billion in sales, whereas the average household spending is expected to reach a maximum of $1,778.
Can email marketing reach this potential? Well, yes. 68% of shoppers are more attentive to company emails during holidays, and customers who receive email offers spend 138 times more than those who don’t.
Consider this article as your cue to execute a powerful email campaign this Christmas. The following section provides a few suggestions of the different types of Christmas emails you must be sending.
8 Christmas Email Campaign Ideas You Must Follow
Should you just wish your customers a happy Christmas and call it a day? Nope. To become a prominent figure in this season, you must send a variety of well-timed emails.
The below list of Christmas email campaigns is a great starting point:
1. Offer a Christmas gift
‘Tis the season to send presents. While your customers are giving gifts to their friends and family, you should give presents to them. Not only is it a smart strategy to boost sales quickly, but it will help in strengthening customer relationships in the long run.
Three of the most popular gifts you can give are:
Gift cards.
For 55% of people, receiving a gift card is at the top of their wishlist. To keep business costs low, you can offer gift cards after customers spend a certain amount of money.
Free shipping.
For customers, a high shipping cost is discouraging to the point where they’ll look for competitors. 91% of shoppers will buy from a brand if free shipping is provided.
Discounts.
If all else fails, offer a Christmas discount. Your customers would appreciate the price reductions since Christmas requires more spending than other holidays. 47% of shoppers say they will only purchase items on sale during the holiday season.
2. Host a Christmas giveaway
Keeping the gifting trend alive, you can step it up a notch by hosting a festive giveaway.
For any giveaway to perform well, it must include two elements. The prize offered should be substantial enough that people get excited, and it must be easy to participate so that more and more people can join in on the fun.
You can get really creative with the design of Christmas giveaway emails, e.g., include a spin the wheel or gifts under a Christmas tree.
3. Greet your customers
While you should definitely use Christmas to go high on promotions, don’t forget to wish your customers. The latter appears thoughtful and ensures you don’t sound like a greedy company only interested in sales.
The following email from Curate Labs fits the bill. We love the simplistic design and the considerate copy.
4. Build a positive PR
Christmas is a joyous time for everyone, including your employees. We’re sure you’re one of those great companies that looks after your staff as much as your customers.
Hit two targets with one arrow by highlighting your internal festivities in your Christmas emails. You can show pictures of a company-wide Christmas party or share hosting tips given by team members.
Such emails will make you appear considerate and might be the reason why your customers choose you over your competitors. Don’t believe us? According to research, 29% of people said that employee treatment by companies decides whether they become loyal customers or not.
5. Promote your Christmas collection
Christmas calls for family time, brunches, and late-night parties. People aren’t shy about spending money to look good or decorate their houses. In other words, you must promote your Christmas collection, irrespective of whichever industry you’re in.
Harry’s chose Christmas to promote its winter shaving set and has used psychological tricks in the email copy to convince subscribers to purchase.
6. Show your kind side
Ever heard of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)? It’ll be your friend this Christmas season. While your CSR activities must be fueled with an ambition to help others, you can always turn them into a promotional email.
If you plan to participate in local food banks or donate presents, you can highlight these activities in your Christmas emails. CSR greatly influences purchasing decisions as 68% of people consider social responsibility the most important attribute of any company.
7. Feature an advent calendar
If you don’t know what an advent calendar is, you’re greatly missing out. It’s a special calendar that counts the days to Christmas. While some feature 24 days, others include 12 days - the number is up to you.
While we suggest offering a physical advent calendar with surprise gifts and then promoting it over emails (like Lancôme did below), you can also promote limited-time discounts over a set number of days.
8. Send abandoned cart emails
With so many promotional emails at one’s disposal, your audience will go back and forth checking out products and adding them to shopping carts. There will also be a high percentage of people who abandon these carts.
A smart move is to send abandoned cart emails. As per research, 45% of all abandoned cart emails are opened, and in half of these opened emails, recipients made a purchase. You can make these emails more effective by offering free shipping or limited-time discounts.
How to Create the Best Christmas Emails? 6 Tips.
Since now you know the different Christmas campaign ideas you can play around with, it’s time to level up. It’s not easy designing irresistible Christmas emails, but the following tips make this process a smooth one;
Make subject lines festive
If the gingerbread house doesn’t look good, no one is going to eat it. The same applies to the subject lines of Christmas emails. The subject lines determine whether an email gets opened or not.
Before we proceed, answer this; what are the three things that come to your mind when you think of Christmas?
We’ll go first: Santa, gifts, and fruit cake. We’re sure your answers are as festive as ours. Make sure to capture this same festivity in your subject lines. Write Christmas puns, add holiday-inspired emojis, and do anything that displays the essence of this occasion.
If you’re still unsure, we got you. Feel free to copy the following foolproof subject lines.
Inviting Christmas email subject lines
Even Santa loves our Christmas discounts 🎅🏽
Oh deer, you wouldn’t want to miss on these last-minute deals.
You, us, and eggnog - a match made in Christmas heaven ❤️
Christmas is more fun with 50% off on your favorites.
12 days to Christmas, special offers for you 🎄
Have a jolly good time this Christmas.
Spread the love with these DIY gits 💝
Free delivery on Christmas gifts if you order now.
Hey, you forgot to purchase these items 💔
Happy Christmas, open for a present 🎁
Design crazy good Christmas emails
Don’t create the email that inspires the next ugly Christmas sweater.
For Christmas emails to play the part, they must feature an appealing design. Think of Christmas decorations and merge them into email design.
Your Christmas emails must include some or all of the following elements:
Interactive features: Carousels, gamification elements, and videos.
Holiday theme: Santa, snow, cookies, candy canes, and bells.
Urgency-creating factors: Countdown timers and hourglass.
Brand-centric design: Brand colors and style.
If you’re a smart email marketer, you can reduce the cost and hassle of hiring a designer by using ready-made Christmas email templates. The ones we have at Unlayer are responsive, customizable, and fully white-labeled.
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](https://unlayer.com/email-templates/christmas)
Play around with content
Not only the design but the content also has to be on point. Since people are off from work and school, no one is going to bother reading long emails. In fact, the real art lies in communicating your message in as few words as possible.
The content for Christmas emails must also be in sync with the type of email you’re sending. If launching a promotional email, opt for a persuasive tone. On the other hand, if you’re just greeting your customers, choose a softer and polite tone.
One trick for writing irresistible email copy is to safely inject humor into it. The easiest way to do that is by using Christmas-related puns. However, use them tastefully and avoid causing a pun vomit, aka adding too many of them in a single email.
Analyze purchasing habits of past holidays
One of the many reasons why marketers love Christmas is that it comes after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. This means you can analyze your customers’ purchasing habits during these holidays and then adapt your strategies for Christmas and holiday email marketing accordingly.
You can also note down the times when your customers open and click on your emails the most. Another thing to notice is which gender purchased the most products. Once you have your answer, you can send targeted emails.
Include social sharing buttons
In the debate of email marketing vs. social media marketing, both channels win. For a successful Christmas season, you must ensure to integrate all your marketing channels. One way to do so is by adding social sharing buttons in Christmas emails.
These sharing buttons are not to be confused with the social icons appearing in the email footer. The former allows your customers to quickly share discounts, deals, and giveaways straight to their social media accounts. Hence increasing social proof and generating more leads.
The following email from Sony Music Australia features attractive-looking social sharing buttons.
Make Christmas emails responsive
As we said before, people are on their days off during Christmas. No one is going to burst out their laptop to view your emails. Hence, you must ensure your Christmas emails are responsive.
What do we mean by responsive design? The email and its content must appear as intended across all devices, be it mobile phones, tablets, or laptops.
While we suggest opting for responsive email templates, you can follow the below actionable tips;
The email fonts chosen must be legible on all screens. Stick to sans serif fonts only.
The call to action buttons must be large enough to be clicked by one’s thumb.
Limit the vertical scroll of your emails.
Avoid hyperlinking text.
Make sure to leave enough negative space to make the design digestible.
When Should You Send Christmas Emails?
So you’ve finalized your Christmas email campaign, but when should you send it? Before we get into exact numbers, we need to tell you something. If you think sending a single email on Christmas is enough, you’re mistaken.
For marketers, Christmas is not a single day but rather an entire season that needs to be benefitted from. With that being said, let’s move on to the specifics.
Pre-Christmas
You should start sending Christmas emails as early as October. If you think that’s too soon, it really isn’t. In 2023, 50 % of buyers were are expected to start their holiday shopping before October end. According to MuchNeeded, December 15-24 was expected to witness 40% of all Christmas sales in 2020.
The truth is that people purchase gifts for their loved ones during Christmas, which is why they start early with their holiday shopping. We suggest sending Christmas emails by mid-October. You can launch a teaser campaign, send gift guides, or offer early bird discounts.
Christmas
You should be sending at least two emails on Christmas day. One should be a greeting, while the other could be an email promoting last-minute deals or DIY gift ideas.
Post-Christmas
The day following Christmas, aka Boxing Day, presents a great opportunity to clear any unwanted stock. This can also be merged with a New Years’ sale to grab some extra bucks.
Wrap Up
Designing Christmas emails that turn heads is not a difficult task with this article. Just follow these tips to the tee, and you’ll witness for yourself a successful Christmas email campaign.
Have any tips to add? Comment below.