#119. SMS Campaigns Calendar for November and December 2022 | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hello everyone and welcome to Flowium podcast. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak. I’m a marketeer at an agency called Flowium. And here at Flowium we believe in delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s what we are doing here. We do deliver the full service email marketing to all of our clients. So if you want to learn more about us, go to flowium.com well, in the meantime, today we will be talking about sms. Sms, what to send and what to not to send during this busy holiday season of November and December. I know some of you are still very skeptical about sms. Believe me, that’s where I’ve been with sms. Just because it feels like a very personal mean of communication, almost very intrusive I would say. But believe it or not, a lot of people actually prefer receiving SMS communication from the brands that they love. Actually, 85% of customer prefer to communicate with their favorite brands via text. And that’s when think about it, I mean, it’s understandable, right? When you love some brand, you want to be the first one to hear about their promotions, about their new collections, news and stuff like that. Another interesting thing to remember when you’re talking about SMS marketing is that 80% of all E commerce customers actually use their phones to make purchases. Which makes this like SMS marketing very, very relevant. Right? And the number that blows my mind every time, see it, is that 98% of those SMS that you send as a brand get opened. 98%. So when it comes to SMS, we don’t even look at the open rate just because it’s so high, it’s irrelevant. So when it comes to sms, we’ll look mostly at click through rates to understand whether or not the campaign was relevant or interesting. But all these numbers, they just show you that SMS is here. SMS is here to stay. It’s huge. And especially during the holidays, when you want to stand out, when you want to be seen, when you want to be heard, right, SMS is the way to go. So right now we’re just gonna go quickly over some November and December campaigns, ideas. So on the first day of November and I really love this campaign. It almost sounds counterintuitive to sound to send this campaign, but believe me, campaigns like this, they do build a relationship with your customer. Like a long lasting relationship with your customer. Not just like a marketing transaction kind of relations, but more like a friend to friend. So on the first day of November, for a lot of our clients, we’ll send this campaign, it’s called the Holiday opt out campaign to anybody who does not want to receive text. So basically instead of losing a lot of people during the holiday season because you will be sending much more SMS than you usually do, you can create this like landing page or this like a preference page where you can opt out people temporarily. So if they click this link you can then create the segment and the segment can be like excluded from holiday campaigns. A, it will help you with deliverability so not a lot of people will unsubscribe from you. And B, as I mentioned, you will start building this like trusting relationship with your customer. Then on Friday we can send this campaign to your VIP segments. And by the way, definition of the VIP can be different depending on who you’re selling to and what you’re selling to. Typical definition is like VIP someone who have placed three plus orders in the last 12 months or they’ve spent three times the average order value in the last 12 months. So definition of the segment can be different depending on what you’re selling. And as we love to say, people who are buying socks are very different from people like a customer who are buying the socks is very different from customer who’s buying mattress. Right. Their customer journeys will be different. So that’s why obviously the definition of the segment will be different as well. So it’s a good idea to send this like holiday gift guide to your VIP segment few weeks before your Black Friday cyber sale. When it comes to holiday gifts, you can create like different stuff. This is the email. I really loved the gift guide from P and Co. So basically they created this very simple email. Obviously you can do like a similar thing on your blog or you can do a similar thing in the SMS and they kind of have like different categories like category for like under $35 categories for him and her categories for headwear or like gift card. You can do a gift guide for holiday stocking stuffers, meaning that it doesn’t have to be something like expensive and fancy to promote it around the holidays because people are always on the hunt for those smaller stocking stuffers as well. You can divide it by categories by age or by interest. For example, you can say like this gift is a perfect gift for art lover or this gift is perfect gift for people who love, I don’t know, like minimal prints or whatever. So yeah, you can, you can do all kinds of guides. Guides and what I will be doing with all of my clients instead of sending the traffic to like outside resources or like the outside guide, we will create this little Christmas guides in the blog section, you know, in the blog section of their website. And basically this is the resource that can be repurposed even like later this month. You can send it to your, to like a different segment of your customers. A, you will bring customers to your website. So that’s always great before the holidays. B, you will educate your customers about what else is on the website because very often people buy, buy like one sort of like type of the product and they have no idea what else are you selling or like they are not as educated about your product. So that’s a good idea to educate your customers about the product. Also it’s a good idea to maybe like feature some of the products that are kind of not of your best sellers but you still need to move the inventory around. So on Friday the 4th, we’re going to send this gift guide but only to VIP segments for now. Then if you have a so called personal shoppers and I know that some brands are doing that, you can send the similar SMS on November 8th. When I say personal shopper I mean that there will be an actual person who will help your VIP customer to do all of their shopping. They will reach out to them and say something like, hey, do you need help with your order? Here is what we think you might like. Here is what is like trendy this year? Something like this. Not all of the brands have, have this kind of service, but if you do definitely feature it on sms, then a week after you’ve sent the gift guide to your VIP segment you can send it, you can sort of like expand it to your entire list. You can send the gift guide to your full list, same gift guide, maybe change the copy a bit because every time we’re sending something to VIP people we want them to feel special. We want them to feel like they are VAPs. That’s why we give early access to them for everything. But giving the access to gift guide to your entire list is also a good idea. Right? Because some people probably like don’t know so much about your brand. Some people probably want to learn more. And also remember most of the people are doing their holiday shopping like during the Months of November, sometimes in December. So this is your chance to educate your customers on everything that you have on your website. This is a fun little campaign too. On November 17 and 18 you can do a free shipping day. And this gets me every time. But it’s funny how well customers respond to free shipping promo every time. I even have this like one customer who always have free shipping. That’s like the part of their basically offer whatever they’re selling. They’re providing a free shipping for the customer. But sometimes we specifically mention it in the copy or in the campaigns and people are going crazy for free shipping. And it’s like the same with me. Yes, I can spend like 300 on clothes and shopping, but if they, if at the end of the shopping they will ask me to pay like $5 for shipping, I would be very hesitant to pay that. I don’t know, it’s just like something, it’s something weird. But actually shipment payments is a very popular reason for people to abandon their card. So if you can offer free shipment, definitely, definitely do that. And usually it also cheaper than offering like a bigger discount, right? So if you want to offer some sort of incentive but don’t want be giving a very high discount codes because you don’t want to train your people to expect discount codes from you all the time, especially before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, right, Give them free shipping. So on 17 you can send free shipping weekend campaign and then on 18 you can remind about the campaign. So pretty much you’re going to have the free shipping for four days straight. Initial campaign, then reminder. And this campaigns, I would only send them to engage customers. So don’t send them to your entire list because I mean during this month will have a few, quite a few campaigns that will be sent to your entire list. So I would probably focus only on engaged customers. So then on Sunday afternoon like 2pm customer local time or something. Obviously you need to know your customer to decide on a perfect time to send the campaign to. But you can send a final free shipping weekend campaign reminder Monday. So basically a few days before the holiday, before the Black Friday, you can send an exclusive first look campaign to your VIP customers. So you can basically give like a teaser of what will be happening soon. Some brands are even giving the discount codes early to their VIP customers, but that depends on your overall strategy. So you can give an exclusive first look campaign saying like don’t buy anything today. In few days you’re gonna get 20% off this and that product or something like that. Again just to build that Anticipation to make sure on Black Friday you will be very successful. You can do similar day later to your engaged segment, but then you can literally give an early access to your VIP customers on Wednesday, November 23rd on Thanksgiving. We usually don’t send anything just because it’s usually a day normally spent with families and you don’t want to be like too aggressive with your sms. Some brands are still sending emails and I’m like totally cool with that especially if you put it more as a thank you for being with us email versus a promotional email. So I’m like still cool with that sms. Well I mean be careful with sms right? Because SMS is more personal mean of communication. You don’t want to be too, too annoying with your subscribers. So yeah. And then on Friday, a Black Friday, the biggest day of the year, we will send the AM Friday campaign. So basically you’ll, you’ll best either your entire list or engage. You decide with SMS saying like this promotion is happening. This is the discount code. This is when it ends. It’s, it’s a big one. You guys, you definitely should follow up with sms. Sometimes after the email. One thing that I’ve started doing for my clients is that we’re sending the email and then like literally not even 30 minutes after that we’re sending, we follow it with SMS. So basically your customers are hearing from you from different channels so they can use whatever channel that is like more convenient for them to make their purchase. Then if you have, if you are like B2B or if you’re selling to businesses, you can send a campaign to like small businesses on your list. Also this Saturday 26th, normally we don’t send SMS on weekends, but it’s appropriate during the Black Friday Cyber Monday season. Right? If you maybe sell, sell some stuff that can be good corporate gifts, right? This is the K. This is the way where you can talk about it. Or maybe you’re selling something like to small businesses. So yeah, definitely do that. Or even if you are a small business yourself, you can send a campaign saying like thank you for supporting our small business during the holiday season. Here’s the discount for you. Remember to use it because the discount expires in like 24 hours or something. So. So yeah, if you are one of those brands who are having different promotions for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you can definitely tease your Cyber Monday sale at the end of the day on Sunday and then on Monday you can follow with a big AM Cyber Monday promotion where you are explaining the promotion, what they can get and when it ends. And finally you can basically send like a final, final reminder campaign sometimes in the morning on Tuesday 29th, saying like this is your last chance to use this discount and I would only Send it to 30 days engaged just because again, you don’t want to be too aggressive with your promotions. Even though it’s a holiday season sms, it’s still a bit more of a private mean of communication. So that’s November. Now when you look at the December calendar, it’s definitely less busy than November and that’s fine because most of the action usually happens in November anyways and well maybe the first week or week and a half of December. So a good campaign to send, especially if you’re the brand that don’t offer any promotions, is the last guaranteed, basically like a last days to guaranteed delivery campaign. So this is the campaign where you are not offering any promotions unless you want to. But we usually, we normally don’t. This is the campaign where you can say something like this is the last day for you to place your order. If you want us to deliver the product in time for Christmas, if we don’t deliver, you have a guaranteed money returned or whatever. And you can notice that we’re sending this campaign pretty early in the month because last year there were a lot of delays. A lot of things in the industry were happening that packages were delayed. That’s why we’re sending this early in the month. And you, you can kind of send the similar campaign on the sex, right? So like a day after that saying like, well today is your last chance, like tomorrow we reminded you. But today is your final, final chance to place your last order. Here you can start thinking about New Year sales and if you have some specific New year promotions, you can even start promoting it. If you are selling some new year specific products or if you are having some good gifts for New Year’s, this is like your day to start promot. Now on 13 you can send another gift guide SMS because if you have this resource you might as well promote it across all of your channels. It’s a great resource to have. If you don’t have it, definitely create one. You can do it on your blog, which I think is the best. But if you don’t want to do the blog you can also do maybe like a TikTok video or like Instagram video which also a good idea because you will be sending your traffic still to your resource. Even though it’s not your website, you will still be able to capture some of those customers outside of your platform which is Also, also not a bad idea. And on 16 you can send the holiday greeting campaigns and a lot of brands are staying away from wishing happy or like Merry Christmas because A some people don’t celebrate Christmas, B some people celebrate like other holidays. There are some people who like a different cultures, they have like their own stuff and a lot of holidays are happening in December so usually we say Happy Holidays, holiday greeting campaign. You can do something even like a bit more personal with say the picture of your team. That’s something that we’ve done last year with our team with Flowium. We’ve even like recorded a quick video for our subscribers I think. But also you can do something like personal and like be, be genuine and thank your customers for being with you this year. Maybe share some highlights of the year. These are always a very sweet and it adds a bit of a personal touch to your campaigns as well. And of course on 23rd, basically, basically the day before Christmas or the day before Christmas Eve, you can start creating your New Year’s SMS campaigns. And on 31st we usually do the last sale of the year so we can say something like here is the, here is the promotion. It ends when the end, when the year ends. So Basically at midnight 2022, December 31, 2022, your discount will be over just as this year will be over. A bit dramatic but people love, love it, believe me. So yeah, so here you have it. SMS calendars for November and December. I hope it wasn’t too, too, too aggressive for you. Obviously we gave you all of the campaigns. It doesn’t mean that you have to send each and every one of them. But if you guys are looking for some inspiration, if you want to basically get some more campaigns ideas for your not just for November, December, but for the entire year, go to Flowium do slash calendar because that’s where we share all of our calendars for the entire year. So the campaign ideas, segmentation ideas, videos, podcast, you’ll find all of the information@flowium.com calendar thank you so much for listening. It’s always pleasure to talk to you. I hope that this Black Friday Cyber Monday will be very successful for you guys and we’ll do our best to prepare you for this season. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you here, here next week. Bye.