Use these dynamic tools to help maintain momentum during the holiday sales season.
You made it through the peak shopping rush, but the holiday season is far from over. Millions of customers are still actively purchasing from brands, providing plenty of opportunity to maximize sales through the end of the year.
To take advantage, make sure you’re not leaving your holiday marketing campaigns on cruise control. Use these data-driven tools to help turn potential holiday sales into reality.
As you might have realized, prospective customers sometimes need multiple interactions with your brand before they’re ready to buy. This means that it may take more than one visit to your website to convince them to purchase. Setting up retargeting ads can help you establish multiple points of contact with would-be customers while they’re away from your website.
Retargeting campaigns use data gathered when potential customers visit your website or social media profiles. This data helps promote your products in ads via the Google Display Network after they leave your website. These retargeting ads remind prospects about products they initially showed interest in on your website, and can be customized to collect data based on actions such as mailing list sign ups or specific product searches.
Ads featured in the Google Display Network can be included on more than 2 million sites around the world that, according to Google, reach over 90% of people on the internet. After a visitor browses your site, they may start to see your ads while reading articles, listening to music, or visiting other stores online. Your ads can remind prospective customers of your products and potentially bring them back to your site when they’re ready to purchase.
Use Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant to build on-brand content for these ad placements, thinking less about your brand's big picture, and more about the product itself. If a person is in the market for your product and comparing yours with a competitor, look for ways to set yours apart. Price, production method, or product quality are great differentiators to focus on when creating these ads.
One crucial automation that can help drive sales is an abandoned cart email. These emails are sent to potential customers who have put an item in their cart but stopped short of purchasing. Since the potential buyer has already shown a clear interest in buying the product, abandoned cart emails can be an effective way to follow up with them and persuade them to convert.
If a high-value lead falls short of completing their purchase, an abandoned cart email can automatically be sent their way thanks to the visitor data (like their email and personal information) you have on file. By sending a follow-up incentive or even a simple reminder email, you can persuade interested shoppers to come back and successfully check out.
A well-timed promotion can help seal the deal, so consider sending more than one email with progressively better offerings. Start with free shipping, a bonus item, or a price discount. But if that's out of your budget, consider following up with excellent product reviews or customer testimonials to help encourage a conversion.
Click here to watch the full installment from our Mailchimp E-commerce Masterclass Series, where we discussed how to optimize your entire marketing plan with email automations.
Crafting personalized messages can be an effective strategy when running an email campaign. Adding specific details such as a recipient’s name, email address, birth date, or location may help encourage them to open and read the email, ideally getting the subscriber closer to converting. Mailchimp’s merge tag feature can help you collect the information needed to create these personalized emails.
Whenever someone joins your email list via a signup form, their information is stored as audience data and tied to a label called a merge tag. Merge tags are unique, text-based identifiers that correspond with the contact information that the subscriber provides. Merge tags allow you to insert unique content—such as the recipient’s name—into emails, giving your campaigns an added layer of personalization.
Use merge tags to produce eye-catching email campaigns that encourage action. You can personalize messages based on customer behavior like past purchases and engagement with content. Whether it be in the subject line or the body of an email, merge tags can be a great way to make a subscriber feel valued and seen on a personal level. Click here to view our variety of easy-to-use, pre-built merge tags, or take things to the next level and create your own.
When crafting email campaigns, it’s important to ensure that your emails are optimized to have the highest impact. As a business owner you know what your customers need to see in your email campaigns, but you also need intuitive tools that can help you effectively communicate these messages. Mailchimp offers several data-driven features that can help you get the most out of your campaigns. We’ve analyzed the performance of millions of emails to design tools that help make your job easier.
Our Subject Line Helper provides real-time, data-driven feedback on your subject line’s word count, character count, punctuation, emojis, and more. The Send Time Optimization tool uses data science to determine when your contacts are most likely to engage, and sends your emails at that time. Lastly, for Premium and Standard Mailchimp accounts, our Content Optimizer analyzes millions of emails to determine best practices regarding your email’s copy, visuals, CTAs, and more.
When running email campaigns, one of the most important things you can do is track the campaign. Campaign tracking provides insights that let you know where you can improve your customer experience on your website, helping lead to more conversions.
Mailchimp’s Google Analytics integration pulls data from your email campaign to help you gain a deeper understanding of how people are moving between your emails and your website. When you integrate Google Analytics, a small piece of code is added to your website that tracks email opens, which links are getting clicked, page views, who’s visiting your content, how they’re engaging with your website, and how long they stayed. All of these insights are valuable pieces of information that can be used to improve the customer experience.
After reviewing your Google Analytics data, you can use the information to improve your email campaign strategy and website design. If users aren’t opening your emails or clicking through the email’s landing page links, use Mailchimp’s content optimization tools to adjust the email’s content, subject lines, and send times. If potential customers are bouncing from important landing pages, use our website builder to redesign the page so CTAs, buttons, and links to your shop are optimized and clearly visible.