With the winter holidays comes a swath of new opportunities to market your business or organization to your customers and supporters. In November 2014 we wrote a post called 5 Tips to Boost Holiday Email Marketing ROI. While this post provided some ideas as to how you can improve your holiday email marketing return on investment, we thought for this week's Flashback Friday we would share some ideas as to how to improve your holiday marketing strategy in general, with the help of a marketing automation platform.
1. Social Media Engagement
Social media is a tool that continues to become more popular than ever, with people of all ages. Roughly 74 percent of internet users have and consistently use at least one social media account. Your organization should be leveraging this popularity by creating and maintaining a strong social presence online. This will increase your customer satisfaction levels and brand loyalty when they see that you are constantly engaging with them on a personal level.
This holiday season, why don't you increase your social media engagement by asking your followers to share photos of their favorite holiday traditions or recipes? Hold a holiday trivia contest on your various social media sites and put the names of those with the correct answers into a draw to receive a prize package from your company. Social media is a largely free advertising forum so why not leverage this to help increase your holiday marketing ROI?
Automate your social media posts with a marketing automation platform to help maintain a strong, consistent presence. Schedule regular posts in advance to post automatically and then pepper in some spontaneous ones to increase follower interaction.
2. Send out a Holiday Newsletter
Newsletters are a great way for your company to provide your clients and prospective clients with all the information that they need to know for this upcoming holiday season – in terms of any sales you may be holding or coupons you may be offering.
To make your newsletters more engaging and more well-received, a marketing automation platform can help you employ a process called conditional formatting. Conditional formatting is something you can use to tailor your newsletter so that recipients only receive the information that they are interested and don't have to wade through the stuff they are not. Clients who are sent targeted information are more likely to purchase from you, as their interests are being catered to.
To employ conditional formatting, the automation platform will take any tracking information it has collected on each newsletter subscriber stored in a contact relationship manager and use it to customize future newsletters to that particular subscriber's interests. So, for example, if the system sees that the subscriber has previously clicked on a bunch of links associated with children's gift ideas and very few of the links regarding pet gifts, future newsletters will be more heavily geared toward providing information on children's gifts and not so much on the pet content.
3. Customer Appreciation Campaigns
Once customers have purchased your product or have used your service, what better way to follow up with that customer and maintain a relationship with them than to show your appreciation through a customer appreciation campaign?
Again, with the help of a marketing automation platform, once a sale is completed, you can have the platform automatically send out a thank you email to that customer, thanking them for their business. A few days later another email can be sent out to remind your customers about your holiday return policies, and then, after the holiday season the system can send out an automatic feedback survey to these same clients to determine their satisfaction with the product or service. Include a free coupon with the survey to entice customers to fill it out and further demonstrate your appreciation.
Gaining client feedback and showing appreciation is imperative to improving your sales and engagement processes. They both help you to foster brand loyalty and increase client stickiness, elevating your overall ROI.
Interested?
To test out these ideas for yourself and to discover how marketing automation can help your company or organization boost your holiday marketing ROI, sign up for a free 14-day trial of the SimplyCast 360 platform.
