#17. Content Ideas To Generate Extra Sales This Holiday Season | Podcast

Vira: 0:16

This will be our biggest holiday season ever. So brace yourself, prepare for the season. Here you have them, the nine best ideas for this holiday season.

Alissa: 0:51

Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of Email Einstein. Alissa and Vira, Here we are, two email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. We are super passionate about email marketing and because we love what we do, we wanted to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world. We specialize in providing a premium full service email ecommerce email marketing experience for all of our clients. Our service is tailored specifically for you and your business and is designed to help increase your online retail revenue by 20 to 50%. That’s 5, 0, not 15, 50%. We deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment. And that is what we’re all about here at Flowium. And today we have a lot to go through. So here we go.

Vira: 1:43

Yeah, guys, I’m super excited about this episode. Today it will not be very technical. We will be talking more about the creative side of email marketing. And today we will be talking about content ideas for the holiday season. For better or worse, a good marketing campaign is always in season. And here in Flowium, we say it constantly. We do believe in delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment and aligning your promotional and content calendars with the things that your customers are actually thinking about or the things that your customers care about. And that’s why we’ve created this library of all of the content ideas throughout the year for all kinds of customers. So if you want to get access to our exclusive content calendars throughout the year, go to flowium.com/calendar and we will give you the access to this huge hub of different content ideas for different days. So in addition to being the most joyful time of the year, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m like the biggest Christmas fan. So this is like definitely the most joyful time of the year for me. But since I’m in E commerce, it’s also probably like the most stressful time of the year for me. And I’m sure for you as well. So this shopping season is also a huge revenue opportunity for you guys in E commerce businesses and competition in the inbox during the holiday season. It’s tough to say the least. So to save you some time and to make sure you’ll not get lost in your customers inboxes, we put together Holiday e Commerce Marketing calendar that gives you a quick summary of dates and holidays you can use to make your holiday season the most profitable, joyful and stress free time of the year. Well, probably it will not be the most stress free time of the year for you, but we’ll try to make it as smooth for you as possible. So yeah, we do have a ton of ideas for for your e commerce email marketing calendar. So stay with us. But before we go there, Alissa, what is the pro tip of the week?

Alissa: 3:51

So our pro tip of the week again, reiterating what Vira had said, we’re not going to get super technical today, but and this pro tip might be something that a lot of you already know, but we cannot stress enough that you need to and really want to pre schedule all of your Black Friday through Cyber Monday campaigns in Klaviyo. And this seems kind of like a no brainer. Like well yeah, duh, pre schedule. But the reason why we’re highlighting this is because there are a lot of people who like to do things a little last minute and that’s okay. I’m also one of those last minute people. As we had mentioned in a couple episodes past, I like to do all my Christmas shopping on like December 22nd. That’s not really the most recommended way to approach things. But for Black Friday through Cyber Monday, those campaigns that go out, we cannot stress enough how important it is to pre schedule. And here’s why. Right now you are getting into the holiday spirit. Right now you are pretty stress free. Or if you are not stress free, you are not as stressed as you probably will be at the end of November because you have a clear mind. It’s really great to get your copy and your design and kind of your framework around how you want these campaigns to go out. Set up now. Set up your segments. Set up the segmentation that you want your campaigns to utilize. Whether it’s making sure that throughout the weekend, if someone makes a purchase from the last E email you sent, they don’t get the next email. That kind of thing. Get it set up now so that when Black Friday through Cyber Monday hits and you’re spending a lot of time dealing with customer requests and customer inquiries and just any fire that could potentially come up. You’re not thinking about your email marketing campaigns going out. Klaviyo is doing the hard work for you. So long story short, don’t stress yourself out more by having to think about 5 million things. Stress yourself out less by only thinking about 4 million things. And let Klaviyo think about 1 million things for you. Pre schedule your campaigns. Don’t think about them when the time comes because you’re gonna be thinking about a ton of other stuff. And that is the end of my TED Talk.

Vira: 5:54

The end of the TED Talk. I love it. Well, that’s a good one actually. And believe me, you will be bombarded with requests from your customers. You will be overwhelmed with the amount of orders you will be getting during this holiday season. So pre, pre scheduling like a must during this time of the year. And when we talk about holiday season, we don’t necessarily mean your like Black Friday Cyber Monday this year. As we already talked about it in episode 11 of our podcast, this year the holiday season will start. Oh my God, like in October. This is not like three days event. Oh no, it will be like a few months long celebration. So if you haven’t started yet, do it asap. So the first sort of like a holiday that we will be discussing in this episode is Veterans Day, November 11th. So probably by the time you will be listening to this podcast you will only have like one day to prepare for the holiday. But still Veterans Day. There is a lot of discussion around this holiday among the marketers. On one hand, holiday email marketing and basically like all marketing is about increasing your revenue. But so many brands are trying to take Veterans Day and turn it into a big three day sale event. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure their intentions are good and they probably want to honor veterans with a sale. However, there’s like a ton of less commercialized ways to approach something as honorable as veterans. So instead of just doing like hey, today’s Veterans Day, everyone get like 30% off. You can do something like you can thank veterans and maybe offer a donation from Veterans Day sales. Say like 10% of all of our sales will go to like this ABC organization or something like that who doesn’t want to help out while purchasing a product they love. So just maybe like change your like approach towards this holiday a bit because this holiday is different from your Black Friday and Christmas and stuff. So that’s something that you can do. You can also give exclusive discounts to veterans and their families if you know that you have those people on the list or you can even create the discount code, send it to everyone and say, hey, here’s discount code like purchase the gift for the veteran or like share it with a veteran or something like that. So don’t do it like too, too commercialized, if you know what I mean. And if you decide to have a sale, do it like smart. It’s a great time actually to a b test your promotions for the upcoming Cyber Monday or Black Friday holidays. So you can test out like dollar promotion versus percentage promotion or like percentage promotion versus free shipping, stuff like that. So if you decide to do the sale, do it smart. And these are simple yet very like thoughtful ways to, to do this campaigns. I try it and just like highlight the sincere gratitude and honor we feel towards our veterans while still like drawing attention to like significance of this day. So don’t go like too, too commercialized on this one.

Alissa: 9:12

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s a really great point because it seems like nowadays marketers try to take advantage of every little holiday that takes place. And while we understand and it is important to get those promos out and the engagement and et cetera, there is definitely a tactical way to do it where it doesn’t look kind of cheap almost, you know, it’s almost like cheapening the brand where you’re, you’re minimizing the importance of the little things and the big things too. And Veterans Day is one of those big things. So I love that. I think that’s such a great, such a great point. So our next kind of content idea around holiday emails. So one of the things that it seems like people have a really hard time with across the board is knowing what to gift other people. And that’s not only with the holidays as with birthdays, was with Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, any, any kind of event where you need to provide a gift to the recipient. The question, the timeless question is, well, what do they want or what should I get them? And what we’re encouraging our brands and our clients and other brands and clients to do is to create the concept of a gift guide. And this is really handy because you can kind of approach it one of two ways. The first way you can do is you can essentially cross sell your best selling items. So this is a little cheap, cheeky, but you can kind of pretend like it’s a gift guide. But if there’s a specific product that you’re wanting to push, you can push that in your gift guide. But then the other side of it is actually providing some, some sincere insight onto what products you sell that will make the best gifts. And there are tons of different gift guides that you can create. One of our clients, Wine Awesomeness, which you guys heard from in the weeks prior from Dale and Logan. One of the gift guides that we’re actually creating for them is they’ve internally created gift bundles that are holiday esque or holiday inspired. And so what we’re doing is we’re creating a gift guide that shows these wine bundles and then giving the options to their customers as well. Hey, if you want to create a holiday wine bundle for your next holiday event or next holiday party, whatever it is, here are the bundles that we would recommend. You can create them in a three pack, four pack, six pack, 12 pack, whatever you want. So you have the option to kind of create a gift guide for one main product and their main product that they sell is wine. So that is something that they’re always going to be kind of upselling and cross selling. It’s just kind of how you do that in a attractive and fun way is really where like the strategy comes in. So that’s one method of giving a gift guide. Another is you can actually create gift guides for different Personas. So for example, if you are a clothing brand and you sell clothes for men, women and children, for the whole family, you can basically create a gift guide or for her so that you can send to all your male subscribers where you’re basically encouraging to encouraging them to make a gift purchase from your store for their wife, sister, mother, whoever it is. You can also create a gift guide for him where you’re sending that to all your female subscribers and they’re making a purchase for their husband, boyfriend, father, grandfather, whoever it is. Or you can create a gift guide that’s for the kids, where you’re basically sending it to adults, essentially all adults. I don’t know how many kids are you really getting involved in a subscriber list for your brand, but where you’re basically encouraging them to make purchases for their kids or for their nieces and nephews, et cetera. So that’s the other side of things. And these Personas that I’m talking about are very kind of surface level. You can get super granular with it if you want to, depending on the subscriber preferences that you have in place, any custom properties that you’ve put in place in Klaviyo, that kind of thing. You can also create gift guides based on on pricing, which sometimes is super handy, especially for people who are Going to holiday parties or having holiday events where their limit is like, hey, we’re doing a Yankee swap or a white elephant gift exchange and the limit is $50. What do you guys have on board that I can buy for $50 or less? That’s super handy as well, because you can basically tier all your gifts based on pricing. And the other thing that you can do is you can blast that gift guide pricing based on pricing to your whole subscriber list or your engaged subscriber list. But the other thing that you can do is you can create like a VIP gift guide based on pricing to your customers that are within your VIP segment that typically tend to spend a little more money on your products than others, where you can kind of upsell, like, hey, this is our like 300 to $100 value going downwards of gifts. And then for the rest of your subscribers, you can show them everything that they can buy from 100 to 75 to 50 to $25, whatever it is. So that’s another idea. And then the other kind of timeless classic, and I know this is a favorite between Vira and I, is a gift guide based on internal company favorites. So whether you’re having your CEO or your CFO or one of the accountants in the accounting department, or an account manager in your client facing department, or someone from customer service, they create their own version of a gift guide based on what they love and what they would love to gift others. So, so if you have Bob, who’s in accounting, you know, create a gift guide and he says, this is my favorite gift and this is the gift that I would purchase from my wife, this is the gift that I would purchase for my, my grandfather, this is the gift I would purchase for my daughter, et cetera, that kind of thing. So then that way you have something that’s a little more personalized and kind of gives your customers a little more insight onto your company as a whole, which is pretty cool. So that would be the second is making sure that you’re going through, through and creating some level of a gift guide. It just provides guidance for your customers if they’re totally clueless on what to buy. And it helps eliminate that, the paradox of choice where they go onto your website and they’re like, oh my gosh, what can I get? Like, there are a million things that I can buy for Christmas or for the holidays for this loved one of mine. And rather than giving them too many choices, you’re giving them kind of like a menu to choose from and like, hey, this is what we would suggest choose something from here and they’re more likely to purchase in that case. So that’s number two for you. Gift guides. Gift guides are a definite big, big, big perk.

Vira: 15:00

Oh yeah, and that behind the scene gift guide is like my favorite. When you’re like introducing someone on your team and saying like, hey, this is our CEO, this is his favorite Christmas song, this is his favorite Christmas neck, and this is his favorite Christmas gift or something, it just like gives this little sweet touch so you can build actually the relationship with the brand. I live for this kind of campaigns. So let’s quickly talk about Black Friday. I mean it’s going to be hard for us because Black Friday is all we talk about right now at Flowium. We can probably do the entire episode on Black Friday alone. And by the way, we do have a pretty cool episode, episode number 11 about our predictions of this Black Friday season 2020. So go back and listen to it if you haven’t yet. And also we do have a pretty cool holiday guide with all the important information on how you can actually prepare for the holidays 2020. So we’ll link all of this resources down below. So go ahead and download them. But let’s just briefly, briefly talk about some cool and alternative ideas for your Black Friday. So back in February before we really felt the impact of the pandemic, we predicted that this year’s holiday sales would grow 14% a percent compared to 2019. But of course the things changed and a lot of like brick and mortar retailers not see such a big growth in 2020. But for us people from E commerce, I mean this will be our biggest holiday season ever. So brace yourself, prepare for the season and here are a few like alternative and fun ideas to implement this Black Friday. So first of all start building excitement around Black Friday campaigns like way before 2020 sevens or whatever. So start building anticipation and the run up to the main event. Maybe you can send some VIP like pre sales. Maybe you can do product release teasers or even something as simple as and sweet as gratitude campaign for on the Thanksgiving day, thanking your customer for like loyalty and giving a heads up about the upcoming sales. So start building this excitement like weeks before the name the big show. Also you can do Black Friday like an old fashioned brick and mortar way say you can create the limited amount of discounts on your Shopify or whatever platform you’re using. For example you can say we have like 100 coupons for 50% off and we have like 50 coupons for like 30% off. So it’s basically like first come, first serve. So you can set it up this way, just like to create this urgency, to create this like anticipation and fun around this thing. You can even maybe like don’t limit the amount of the coupons but just like say that they are limited again to create this sense of urgency. And hey, don’t be shy with reminders. We are going like pretty aggressively with the Black Friday Cyber Monday email reminders. So instead of just sending one big campaign on Black Friday, you can send a.m. and p.m. reminders. You can do like three, three reminders per day. Don’t send them to your entire list though. You can schedule this reminders based on whether or not the customer open email A. So say if they have received this email A but haven’t opened, you will basically resend it to them, but tweak the copy a bit or something like that. So the sequence of emails is another big thing that you can be doing for your Black Friday. I know that some brands are doing daily giveaways, so this is basically like a sequence of like 7, 10, 12 emails where every day they are giving away something. And it not only creates like incentives for subscribers to check their inbox for upcoming announcement, but it also like builds in a way relationship with your subscribers as well. So be creative with your Black Friday campaigns. Don’t be one of those boring companies that are just sending like one plain email and that’s it. Try to add a bit of a creativity to your email marketing at this holiday season. And yeah, again, if you need more ideas, go to our holiday guide and you’ll find much more cool and creative ideas there.

Alissa: 19:29

Yeah, and that holiday guide is so handy. But with the Black Friday stuff, Vira, you’re so right. Like it’s got to get creative and you got to create excitement around it because if you just blast out a random email on Black Friday and an extension of Black Friday, you also have Cyber Monday which happens the weekend immediately or the Monday immediately immediately following that weekend after Black Friday. So you obviously have a couple of different ways that you can kind of approach Cyber Monday. What I’ve personally been seeing. And Vira, maybe you can speak to this a little bit too. What I’ve personally been seeing there is a huge kind of trend towards just doing like a standard extension of what the Black Friday sale was.

Vira: 20:08

That’s a big one. Yeah.

Alissa: 20:10

So it’s like instead of the Black Friday sale just being on Black Friday, it’s now extended throughout the the course of the weekend and into that Monday, Cyber Monday. Because everyone’s pretty much going cyber. You have all these huge major retailers who aren’t even opening on Black Friday because of the pandemic. And so obviously, it just changes the nature of everything. Where Black Friday has now turned into Cyber Black Friday. And then the whole weekend is cyber, and then you have Cyber Month. Say that again.

Vira: 20:36

Cyber Month entire. Like Cyber October, Cyber November and December.

Alissa: 20:40

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it’s. It’s kind of like Cyber Monday this year. It’s not that it doesn’t have any importance, it’s just the fact that Cyber Monday is kind of like the last chance for that cyber sale that’s going to be taking place as early as October. I mean, I received a campaign two weeks ago from a brand where they are giving people exclusive access to their Black Friday sale now, which is nuts to me. And I was like, oh, my gosh, it’s not even Halloween yet. Like, what is going on? Who did this? And all I had to do was just type in my email and then I got access to the sale.

Vira: 21:18

Isn’t it crazy? I wonder if they will have, like, even higher discount around the holidays.

Alissa: 21:25

Yeah, so that was my thinking, which is why I kind of held off. I haven’t made a purchase yet. It’s actually a maternity brand, and I’m getting. I’m getting large enough now where I’m like, okay, I really need these. These maternity leggings. But I’m trying to hold back because it almost feels like there’s a potential for an even bigger sale when it comes to Black Friday. However, they are already starting to go out of stock of a lot of their most popular items. So that’s the other thing is, like, there is a level of urgency where these companies and these brands are rolling out their discounts so early that you’re like, oh, my gosh, is there going to be stuff by the time Black Friday hits or are they going to be all done, you know? So in either case, with Cyber Monday, it’s now kind of turned into an extension of the Black Friday weekend sale. Your other kind of options that you can do, you can change up the offer for Cyber Monday. I have seen this done in the past, and it’s not a bad thing to do. It kind of changes it up a little bit where you’re kind of leaving your customers guessing a little for Cyber Monday, which is really nice. The other kind of thing that you can do is when you change up that offer, you can kind of go big or go home is the way that I see it. So so you can either like blast out some crazy sale that no one has seen yet, where like Black Friday, you’re offering 15% off. And now on Cyber Monday you’re like, hey, we’re going to offer 25% off for the next eight hours. Like, go. You know, there’s that kind of element of surprise, but then also urgency where it’s like, oh my gosh, okay, now we’re stressing out. You can also do what Vira had said and create very limited amount of codes in your Shopify and only have them ready to go on Monday. And then you can send out kind of like this last minute sort of urgency campaign for Monday morning where you’re like, hey, listen, we’ve got 50 codes. Go. And then people just go kind of in a frenzy. Or you can change up the offer any other way where like, okay, listen, we’re running out of stock. People have really been going crazy. We gotta cut this discount. And you can just offer like free shipping or a free gift with a purchase that’s made on Cyber Monday. You just have to evaluate like your customer base and what they’re trained to expect from your brand and then kind of go from there. But if you think you’re going to cut yourself short if you don’t extend that Black Friday sale or you change up the offer for a kind of like worse offer or least less incentivizing offer, then don’t do that because you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot and you don’t want to do that this year of all years.

Vira: 23:37

Oh yeah.

Alissa: 23:38

The other thing that you can do is you can also do a last in stock sale. So this is actually something that one of my clients is planning on doing, but towards the end the day of, of December. But if, for example, you started that sale, your Black Friday sale, or access to the Black Friday sale way earlier and you’re actually starting to run out of stock, you can utilize Cyber Monday as a last in stock sale. Like, hey, listen guys, this is the last day the sale’s going and we’ve got like 20 of these items left in stock. So you either get it now while it’s hot, or you’re not going to get it again. And then just push in that way. Urgency, whether it’s discount oriented or stock oriented, it works. The psychology of it works for people. So play around with that and see what’s going to work best for your company and what makes sense and do it with some integrity because you also don’t want to lie to your customers. Because people see right through that. So definitely have a think about it. But Cyber Monday this year is just expected to be another sale day. Whether you change that up or not is up to you. And I would lean more towards the side of. Yeah, think about, think about adding something exciting for Cyber Monday just to keep Cyber Monday different from all the other days. We are very proud of our e commerce lives and our digital lives and we want to, we want to preserve that in some way. So I would say go for it and try something different for Cyber Monday for sure.

Vira: 24:52

Yeah. And if you are offering like higher discount on Cyber Monday, please, please, please exclude those people who purchased within Black Friday event because they will be pissed if they purchase something with like 50% off and then like 12 hours later they receive email. Oh, you could have purchased it with like 70% off or whatever. So exclude those people. Usually that’s something that I do with my clients. I send those like Cyber Monday emails only to people who haven’t purchased anything within that Black Friday week or months or whatever. And yeah, pushing freebies and pushing your like inventory that you have and that you need to sell before Christmas is another good idea. So you can say like purchase this socks and get like second pair of Christmas socks for free or something like that. So that’s a good idea as well. And yeah, I know that a lot of brands are doing this like Christmas specific product launches, you know, like Christmas, I don’t know, like Santa hats or whatever. You will not need your Santa hats in July. So try to sell them, Try to sell them out like before Christmas obviously. But yeah, that’s a good thing to do. And yeah, I agree with you, Alissa. Be creative. But integrity is very important as well. So don’t like, don’t cheat with your Monday because people will know.

Alissa: 26:47

Yeah, they find out. They always know. And then you won’t get the business back.

Vira: 26:51

Oh yeah. So December 1st, another big holiday that I personally love. It’s called the Giving Tuesday and it’s the charitable counterpart to Cyber Week. Right. This holiday is a biggest opportunity for you to highlight your charitable giving partners or opportunities to give back during this season of gifting. So sales are great, discounts are great. But having this little giving back to society thing is another great opportunity to build your brand. So you can do something as simple as like percentage of all of the sales from today will go to ABC organization, just like we talked for the Veterans Day. But you can also use hashtags and that’s something that I’ve done with my customers and it works like charm. So send an email to your subscribers and encourage them to post images of themselves on your social media using your products and using your hashtag. Ask them to include, like, a specific hashtag in their post. And this way it will both, like, increase the visibility of the images on social media and also make for customers easier to search for your product. But you can say that for every hashtag that you’re using, we will donate, like $1 to, like, specific organization or something like that. I know that McDonald’s had like, this huge promotion in Canada. I’m not sure if you guys had it in the States as well. A lot of telecommunication companies are doing that. A lot of, like, different fashion brands are doing that. So that’s a beautiful little holiday. And if you have some charitable partners, definitely create a campaign around it on December 1st on Giving Tuesday.

Alissa: 28:38

Yeah, Giving Tuesday is a nice one. It’s like November is that spirit of gratitude, and then December is that spirit of giving. So you may as well kind of like dive head first and really take advantage of that because it’s. It’s heartfelt, it’s nice, and people want to know that they support and are buying from a company that actually cares. So even if it’s as little as that. You had mentioned Vira of just an email of encouragement or encouraging your subscribers to actually give. If giving charitably, financially speaking, is not possible for your brand, then it goes such a long way. I can’t even. Can’t even explain it.

Vira: 29:11

It doesn’t even have to be like a charity organization. Maybe you can do a giveaway and help your customers in need, or maybe your customers know someone who would benefit from, get from your product or something like that. That’s create like a good, good, like, feeling around your brand. Right. So think. Think creatively about it.

Alissa: 29:30

Yeah, I love that. I really like that. Given Tuesday. That’s a good one. That is a good one. So our next one is for Hanukkah. I’m actually not sure I’m Jewish and I should know when this starts, but I don’t actually know when Hanukkah starts this year. I think it’s like December 10th or the 12th or something.

Vira: 29:47

Something like that. I think it is.

Alissa: 29:48

Hanukkah is a great idea to incorporate in either campaigns or you could even do it as an automation if your primary demographic actually celebrates Hanukkah. Obviously it’s not as important to do if that’s not the case. But for brands that are wanting to go kind of like the more inclusive Route, you can include a flow. Again, like I said, a flow or a set of campaigns. Kind of talks about like eight days of Hanukkah or eight Crazy Nights of Hanukkah, as our beloved Adam Sandler has sung before. So kind of the idea around this is there are a few creative approaches to it when it comes to the flows. You can actually set up a flow to start on a certain date and then basically just trigger a new email to go out every single day until Hanukkah ends. That’s the first approach. You can also set out your own campaigns where you’re manually setting them out and you’re segmenting them split specifically to a part of. To a segment within your subscriber list. That’s possible, too. Just whichever approach you want to take to it. If you want to go manual, go manual. If you don’t want to go manual, go flow. That’s, that’s, that’s my thinking around it always. And then with regards to the content of the actual campaigns, a couple of things that you can do is you can provide a gift or like, some kind of giveaway or a freebie for those eight days, if that’s something within the capacity of your company to do. If you guys have, like a ton of free content or a ton of, like, things that you can just give away, like, hey, we have a water bottle that’s branded, or we have a towel that’s branded or whatever it is. Like, if that’s something that you guys can do, do it. The freebies are nice and as small as they can be. They’re just fun. It just adds to the holiday spirit. The other side of it is you can also provide a split gift guide where you’re basically for eight days giving ideas as to what people can gift others for the holidays. And that can come in the form of gift cards, because those are more instantaneous when you go the digital route. They can be purchases of physical items. Obviously, these people won’t be receiving them in time for Hanukkah, but you can offer some kind of, like, little gift receipt that’s like, hey, your gift. Your gift for Hanukkah, for the sixth night of Hanukkah is coming. It’s going to be this. And then you can kind of gift, like in an envelope until the. The gift actually arrives. There are some creative ways that you can get around the fact that the physical gift is not here, but I would say those are kind of probably the two more popular options of either generating some kind of level of freebies for the eight days or providing ideas for gifts for those eight days for loved ones, for anybody, whatever it is that your brand sells. But again, Hanukkah is not widely celebrated. So not a huge, huge, huge priority if this isn’t a demographic that you know, you target. But in the same token, we live in a world where inclusivity is really important. And so if you do want to make sure that you’re including all holidays, Hanukkah is definitely one of those that you want to, that you want to pop in there. And it’s eight days so you can get really fun and creative on that side of things. So definitely another content idea for you guys out there when it comes to the holidays in December.

Vira: 32:49

Yeah, for sure. I, I love it. I love it. We actually like in, in Canada, it’s pretty big holiday and even people who are not like Jews, they celebrate the holiday. And in the center of the city we have like both Christmas tree and Menorah, I think it’s called. Right.

Alissa: 33:03

Wow, I did not know that.

Vira: 33:05

I mean it’s big in, in Toronto. It’s big, I guess because Toronto has like a big Jewish community and yeah, for sure. Guys, be, be inclusive this, this holiday season. It’s big. So December 14th, another great opportunity for you to send a good campaign, December 14th as a free shipping date. So a lot of companies are doing this campaign where they are offering a free shipping and you can say something like, hey, order before X date, like order before December 15th or whatever and have it shipped to you on time for Christmas or something like that. Well, it depends on how long it takes for you to ship and send the product. And ideally your promotional campaigns should have been running for like at least a week before the holiday festivity begins. But believe you will have a lot of those like last minute Christmas shoppers. So target them with this like little campaigns like hey, today is the last chance to order for you to get this package for Christmas. And by the way, we are offering like free shipping today. So that’s something that you can also be doing. So think about it. Or any other actually like free shipping campaigns would be good as well. So December 14th, you guys.

Alissa: 34:17

Yeah, I love it. So is free shipping day. Is that like a, is that a standard holiday?

Vira: 34:22

Yeah, I think, I think it’s like a US Holiday or something. Well, US and Canada I guess, because we have it here as well and something that we’ll be doing this year. We have one customer, one client of mine, he’s selling toast actually like bread, the croissant bread. It’s, it’s delicious and it’s.

Alissa: 34:38

Oh, my gosh.

Vira: 34:39

So we will actually send the campaign before Thanksgiving saying something like, hey, order it today so we can deliver it to you on time for Thanksgiving. And by the way, here’s the cool Thanksgiving recipe that you can, that you can do with our bread. We’ll do the same for Christmas.

Alissa: 34:56

Awesome. That’s so cool.

Vira: 34:58

You will have a lot of last minute shoppers. So target those people. Target those people. I am one of those people.

Alissa: 35:07

Yeah, same.

Vira: 35:08

So this campaigns are super helpful to me.

Alissa: 35:10

Same. I am definitely one of those people. And I need to know when my last shot is so I don’t disappoint people on Christmas. Awesome. So on the flip side of Hanukkah is Christmas, obviously not that they’re opposites, but just, you know, you have those two kind of major holidays in December. So one of your options for Christmas is to do 12 Days of Christmas. I’ve been asked this question before. Why 12 days of Christmas? And it’s because of that little Christmas carol. On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me. You love my voice. It’s so pretty.

Vira: 35:41

You know, verses of this, of this song?

Alissa: 35:45

Yeah, no, I do. So. Yeah, yeah. This is actually a tradition that we’ve always had in at my house is my dad would always have us on Christmas Eve sing 12 Days of Christmas together as a family. And usually we meet with like extended family, so he’ll pick a person for each number. And so then as we go through, everyone has to say their part. So, yeah, it’s. It’s fun. It’s fun. It’s a nice, nice little holiday tradition that we’ve always, always kept up with in our house. But aside from picking people to sing the song at home on Christmas Eve, you can also set up campaigns or flows that focus primarily on 12 Days of Christmas. And it would be very similar to how you would set up that eight days of Hanukkah. So you can either set up the flows to start on like December 1st or whichever day you feel like makes the most sense for your brand, or you can have the campaigns that are going out. So. And again, you can kind of choose the date dates based on what makes the most sense for your brand and each day. You can provide, gosh, so many different things. You can provide a Christmas recipe, you can provide some level of a gift guide, you can provide a freebie with Christmas and also with Hanukkah, you can get super creative when it comes to the content of these emails. And whether you’re just engaging with your customers or just kind of feeding into that holiday spirit, there is no harm in doing that. This is also a really good time to include any additional last minute promos that you want to include. So you obviously had your crazy Black Friday, Cyber Monday kind of timeframe. But then also in December, people are always looking for a little sneaky deal that they can take advantage of because they’re last minute and they miss the Black Friday deals. So with your 12 days of Christmas, you can offer 15% off or 10% off plus a free gift or whatever it is, or you can even say if you if this is something that your company has the capacity to do on one of the days, hey, with your gift. Today we’ll provide free holiday wrapping and a free holiday card where you receive the gift and it’s perfectly wrapped up in some pretty Christmas wrapping paper with a nice little bow, a card stuck in there, you just fill in the card, that kind of thing. Little details like that and little offerings like that make all the difference for people, especially if it’s going to eliminate something off their to do list. Oh great, I just purchased purchased this gift and now I don’t have to wrap it or oh great, I just purchased this gift and now I don’t have to go out and purchase a card with the gift. The more that you can provide to kind of soften the holiday blow for your customers, the better off you’ll be in a campaign series or automation series. Like 12 Days of Christmas is definitely one that you can utilize in order to take advantage of these kinds of offerings. So make sure that you consider doing something like that. And even if it’s not 12 days of Christmas, you can do a week of Christmas and the promos or the freebies that you offer in each email, they can literally go for the duration of that day. And as soon as the next email goes out, that old promo is over and now the new promo is in and that’s all they get. So give it a go. Because it’s fun to get creative when it’s the holidays. You know, you can make your emails really pretty and you can just make it fun. It’s like almost like an Advent calendar, but instead of opening the box and getting chocolate, you’re getting little digital emails and little notes from one of your favorite brands that are telling you how they’re going to help you this holiday season. So definitely a consideration to keep in mind.

Vira: 39:00

Love this event calendar idea, Alissa. I love it. I’m totally doing it with my clients this year. New Year. Let’s quickly talk about new year because this podcast was a bit longer than we expected because we do have a bunch of cool ideas and we can talk about them and endlessly so New year, something cool that I’ve seen other brands are doing. My favorite one was Spotify last year, but they are not E commerce brand but still. So these are the year in review kind of emails. So this recap kind of emails typically fall into two different categories. They are either a personal overview of how you personally did this year, like what you purchase, like how you use the app, how you use the website or stuff like that, but they are quite technical. Or you can do something like a summary of your own company, like achievements and stats and something like that. If you have introduced the cool product this year, you can talk about if you had like some special customer this year that you want to feature in your email, you can be talking about it as well. You can even do something fun like top 2020 memes that we like at our company this year or you can talk about our favorite joke or 2020 or something. So year in review is a great way to recap this year and believe me, you will have a lot of things to talk about in 2020 because it was a different year for sure. So this campaign will be unique and different and I love receiving those emails. Actually my favorite one, as I mentioned already was Spotify. Last year they actually sent this like super cute email with, hey, this year you listened like X hours of music. This was your favorite artist this year or this was your favorite music band or you listened like five hours of German music. And I had no idea that I listened for like five hours of German rap for God’s sakes. But yeah, it’s, I love this kind of emails because they give you like, they, they help you like to look back and it’s something different. It’s not your typical end of the year sale, although end of the year sales are good as well. But you can, you can just like do them a bit differently this year. So that’s, I think that’s it for our ideas for the holiday season 2020. I mean we do have a gazillion more ideas, but since we are limited in time, here you have them. The nine best ideas for this holiday season. So yeah, that’s, that’s it for me.

Alissa: 41:32

I love it. I love it. And as Vira had mentioned earlier in this podcast, if you do want some more insights on holiday content for the year Just make sure you check out our Flowium Holiday guide. It’s filled to the absolute brim with ideas, tips, inspo suggestions, all the gadgets and gizmos on how to make the most out of this crazy holiday season for your E commerce brand. So definitely, definitely, definitely check it out. It’ll be linked in the description below.

Vira: 41:57

And now to the community question. We do have one question suggestion from our listener Debbie and Debbie suggested it would be great to have a downloadable guide about your email series recommendation. Well Debbie, thank you for asking suggesting actually we do have a resource for this and we’ll link this resource in the description box down below. But it’s our very popular online resource. You can find it or you can find it on our website and there we talk about highly recommended email marketing strategies and practices for e commerce stores. So scroll down and you’ll find the link to our guide down there. And by the way, it’s downloadable. You can download it as a PDF and upload it to your phone or tablet or computer or whatever. So guys just like keep sending us those messages and those questions from the community. We love receiving receiving them. And yeah, if you have any other questions or something you can just like send them to our group or email us or just like type them as a comment under this podcast.

Alissa: 43:03

Yeah and we, we love hearing from from people. The more questions the better. Guys, don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. And again as Vira had just mentioned, if you do have any questions that, that you want us to answer or even any suggestions or anything like that that you want us to feature on a podcast episode, you can type them in, you can email them in, or you can go to flowium.com/ask and go ahead and feed your suggestion or comment or question in there. If you do want to get involved in a community of like minded email marketing geeks like us, or you’re just interested to kind of get some more insight into this world or you’re an E commerce business, business owner or anything of the sort, make sure you join us at flowium.com/community. All of the resources that we did mention today and that were used in the creation of this podcast can be found linked in the description of this episode. So make sure to check it out. You can also find it on our website under each podcast episode you’ll have all the links available there too. And if you are interested in getting some more advice on how to establish a solid email marketing strategy for for your E commerce store, make sure that you visit us at flowium.com/contact and you can sign up for a free consultation. Someone like myself or Vira will kind of give you some insights on what you’re currently doing, what some best practices are, and what you can do to improve what you’re what you’re doing at the moment. So definitely check out that resource because it’s a handy one.

Vira: 44:26

And come back next week because next week we’ll be interviewing another special guest, Eric Helstrom from Chubby’s, the brand that we talked about a lot. And he will be talking to us about how to stay consistently creative when it comes to your email marketing content. So kind of these two episodes go hand in hand with each other. So if you haven’t answered this question, the question to pineapple on pizza or not, make sure to come back next week because that’s exactly what we will be talking about in our next episode. So thank you so much for listening and we hope to see you here next week.

Alissa: 45:02

Bye, guys. Thank you so much. We’ll see you next week.

Vira: 45:04

Bye.