A Recipe to Drive Engagement Over the Holidays

Leveraging email to create a greater connection with your customers

The time between October and December is a pivotal season for growth for our grocery and CPG clients. It represents some of the biggest food occasions of the year, as well as a high consumer propensity to purchase in a short span of time.

The email inbox is one of the most valuable places to be; it’s a curated collection of communications that the consumer has personally opted into. They want to hear from you, so make it count!

As the holiday season approaches, here are a few tips on how you can leverage email to establish more one-to-one, measurable relationships with your customers — and acquire new subscribers, too. 

Identify the Right Content

As you develop your email plan for the holidays, you should ask yourself: What is your most valuable content for the consumer during this season? What sets you apart during this time of year? 

Delivering a series of unique, specialized emails in addition to your regular communications can help your brand stand out, reinforce your value to your audience, and drive extra engagement. This should not simply be more of your usual content — rather, these emails should provide compelling, high-value “extra” content that goes above and beyond your business-as-usual email program. Offering an opt-in for new subscribers to receive these special sends can also be an effective acquisition tool.

At Ingredient, we work closely with our clients to identify and plan this specialized content. In some cases, it can be harvested from existing print materials and other collateral — like unlocking the vault for a limited time. Content plans should also identify opportunities for personalization based on subscriber data (past purchases, propensity to buy, etc.).

Your content plan will help inform the quantity, length, and duration of your email series. It will also identify needs for landing pages, as well as technical and reporting requirements. It serves as the roadmap for the campaign.  

Once the plan is finalized, design, copy, and development work together to create an email series with a differentiated look and feel from your regular campaigns, giving consumers a reason to open and click. 

Find the Right Words — and Images

Writing effective copy for email is a special skill, and our copy team has decades of experience breaking through the background noise with a compelling story. 

The first hurdle during the holidays is getting your customer to open your email — and that starts with a compelling subject line. It’s vital to keep your subject lines short and engaging in order to entice people to open your email, particularly at a time when consumers are busy and inboxes are packed. Make your message stand out, whether that’s with an eye-catching phrase, a highlighted offer, or even an emoji or two when relevant.

Preheader text can be used to your advantage! Use it to support your subject line or highlight another element of your email content to enhance curiosity and increase open rates.

Once your customer has opened the email, your copy and calls to action should be simple and persuasive. The quality and length of copy in email is critical to its success — use compelling (or even fun!) language and keep things short and to the point. 

Likewise, eye-catching, user-friendly design is critical. Using seasonal colors, design elements, and photography that tie into your existing brand guidelines are a great way to attract attention while still supporting your brand’s unique look and feel. 

A well executed seasonal design will also draw your customer in emotionally — it’s all about the warm fuzzies! The goal: get readers excited for the season, keep their eyes on your email for precious additional seconds, and inspire them to engage with your brand.

Our designers, photographers, and developers work closely to ensure design is on-brand, differentiated, usable, and accessible. We also perform extensive testing to ensure that your email will render consistently across devices (yes, even Outlook). 

And … the Technical Stuff: Make Sure Your Email Gets There

Once you have your email copy and design in place, our email campaign managers work with you to deploy your email series, including journey set-up and send strategy, as well as segmentation and analytics tagging in your ESP. Not only are we a certified Salesforce Partner, but we also have experience across a dozen major ESPs. 

Before your email is sent, it undergoes a thorough testing process. Accuracy is important to us! Our campaign managers partner closely with our QA department to ensure that all content, personalization, and dynamic modules are thoroughly tested, everything is in place, and the entire email is rendering correctly to create a seamless user experience.

Even the best emails fail if they don’t reach the inbox. While most ESPs report on delivery rate, they don’t tell you where the email was delivered. Inbox placement reporting is key to verifying that your emails are seen. 

So, How Did It Do?

How will you attribute and quantify engagement from your special series or acquisition efforts? The final step to any email campaign, large or small, is post-send reporting and analytics. 

Defining your KPIs and reporting requirements is essential for meaningful insight; these should be captured at the outset of the project so they can be tracked throughout the email’s journey. Like personalization, analytics tagging goes through our QA process to ensure the right data is being captured. Early visibility into analytics can help identify areas for optimization, while full performance metrics can help you optimize your content for next year — or even next month.

We have deep experience in content strategy, serialized email content, and personalization strategies to help move the needle for our clients during critical business apertures. Regardless of where you are in your holiday planning, we’d love to connect. Contact us now and we can chat about how to optimize your email campaigns heading into the holidays and beyond.