Gift Certificates, Holiday Specials, and Stocking Stuffers


If your business sells to consumers, you definitely should consider doing some extra promotional emails leading up to the holidays. This is something you need to plan now and start executing soon.

You could simply add more targeted promotional messages to your regular newsletter. BUT you've worked hard all year to build your reputation and gain the attention of your readers. Now is the time to capitalize on that a bit. I'm not suggesting that you start blasting your readers with advertising. I am suggesting that a well-planned campaign can be very effective at this time of year.

Here are some ideas to consider:
  • If you sell gift certificates, you'll definitely want to promote them. Recommend who they will be suitable for. Insert Buy Now buttons directly into your newsletter with an immediate call to action.
  • Do a holiday countdown with number of shopping days left.
  • Create special offers or promotions only for your email subscribers. This can also help to get you new subscribers!
  • Make limited-time offers on, for example, a different product or service each week. 
  • Provide unique gift ideas. This might be an opportunity to bundle products and services.
  • Create urgency around ordering deadlines. Include a link to Canada Post mailing deadlines if it makes sense.
  • Close to Christmas, promote stocking stuffer ideas and gift suggestions. Become the best friend of the last minute shopper!
Along with your holiday calls to action, you might also consider sharing your own holiday preparations. Behind the scene photos are great of, for example, decorating your store/office or packaging up products with holiday wrapping.

photo by Steve Rhodes

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Your Goals Shape Your Content

Image
You may have several goals you want to achieve by way of your newsletter (substitute website, blog and/or social media as it applies to you). Probably you want to increase sales. Here are some other possible related goals: 'Touching' your customers, prospects and colleagues on a regular basis Building strong business relationships Developing your reputation and sphere of influence Sharing your valuable information, products, and services Being seen as an expert Growing your fans, followers and blog readership Keeping up with your competition These all may well be good reasons to have a newsletter. The ones that are most important for you will depend on what type of business you have, how long you’ve been in business, what your competitive situation is, and more. You should be able to pick 2-3 goals to specifically focus on - then match your content to those goals. (It's simple logic, but sometimes we forget.) For example, if building your reput...
Keep reading »

That was a Great Conversation But...

Image
Imagine you've just gotten off the phone from a lively conversation with a prospect that lasted an hour. Your purpose in having the call was to build a new business relationship or build on an established one. You both discovered you have much in common and had lots to talk about. What was expected to be a half-hour call became a delightful chat that extended to an hour. You hang up feeling really good about the personal connection you made and pat yourself on the back. Then reality strikes. You check your calendar and realize you're now behind schedule. Your other planned work for the day has been compromised and you'll have to work a longer day or bump something to tomorrow. "That's OK," you think, "It was time well spent." But wait, it's not about you. The person you were speaking with undoubtedly feels the same way. Even though they enjoyed the conversation, now they are also struggling to fulfill their commitments and maintain their work sch...
Keep reading »

Why Prune my Contact List?

How often do you 'prune' your email subscriber list? — iContact (@iContact) March 27, 2014 My answer is: Never! I've got two really good reasons for you: #1. There's value in being seen even if your email goes unopened. If someone has not unsubscribed, don't make assumptions about their wants and needs . Perhaps the timing just isn't right. Being seen in your subscriber's inbox serves as a reminder that can still keep you top of mind. #2. Your open rate is over rated. If you make decisions about deleting contacts based on open rates , you're effectively negating all the hard work you do to build your list . Open rates are understated by the number of 'plain text' or 'text only' views; an image has to be viewed in order to count as an open. With more use of mobile devices, the gap between actual opens and reported opens is increasing. You could be deleting a contact who regularly reads your newsletter on their phone. Are y...
Keep reading »

Content Ideas for Consultants - Getting Started (Part 1)

Image
Just this week I heard it again: “If I start a newsletter, what would I put in it?” While I can think of lots of content ideas for just about any business owner I meet, it’s not so easy for everyone. In fact, it wasn’t always easy for me either. It gets easier, and you get better, with practice. For consultants, there’s an added bonus to spending time creating marketing content and that's learning . Benjamin Franklin said, “There is no better way to learn than to teach.” Sharing valuable content is teaching and, when you’re creating content for your blog or newsletter, you’ll also be doing research, checking assumptions, and developing opinions . If you’re a new business owner, or new to developing content, finding a place to start might feel like picking a needle out of a haystack. In this series of posts, I'll explain how to get started and accomplish other goals, too. Build Your Confidence Since confidence comes from writing about what you know , start with crea...
Keep reading »

How Planning for Failure Can Help Ensure You Don't Fail

Image
We all want things we're working on to be successful. Nobody ever plans to fail... but wait, planning for failure can be a useful exercise. The term 'premortem' comes to us from the field of project management. According to the Harvard Business Review : "A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. [...] A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied." Instead of considering what might go wrong, you 'pretend' your initiative has already failed. Then you brainstorm to come up with all the possible reasons for the failure. This gives you the perspective of hindsight, which works differently than foresight. And you can see that this also ties into risk. A simple example might be when I decide to make a special offer. The obvious f...
Keep reading »

Oh, Look! There Goes My Goal

Image
I don't need to tell you how hard it is to stay focused. And that's why it's so important to have goals that we can refer to that will keep us on track. Goals are sometimes quite removed from our daily activities. Once they're determined , a strategy is built around them. And then plans are made to execute the strategy. Next plans are broken down into action items and finally, we do or delegate specific tasks. When we're in "task mode" our goals may be completely out of mind. That's not a bad thing... as long as we're doing the things we planned to implement the strategy that will achieve our goals. Deviating from our plans is where we can get into trouble , and one way that happens is called "scope creep". That's a project management term - what is running a small business if not an ever-evolving project? Scope creep can happen accidentally but also "on purpose" and we need to be cautious of either. It's ea...
Keep reading »

The Truth About Magic Bullets

Image
There are no 3-easy-steps to becoming a millionaire. If magic bullets and passive income really existed, we'd ALL be sitting around enjoying the view from our yachts. Cambridge Dictionary defines a 'magic bullet' as "a quick and simple solution to a difficult problem". None of the major dictionaries offer a definition for 'passive income'. These are marketing myths. They will cost you more money than you'll make. Or you will give up doing the work that is your expertise to spend your time doing marketing work. It's nice to dream but then get back to work. PS: There are no unicorns in real life either. Click to Tweet this Article
Keep reading »

Make Sharing Easy

Image
example of sharing buttons I'm such a critic - an enewsletter critic that is. Of course, critiquing other newsletters is partly how I get better at my job. I'm often disappointed when I receive a newsletter or promotional email that doesn't give me buttons for easy sharing, especially when it's something I want to share. In many cases, with the amount of information to read these days, I will shrug and move on. I would have shared the information but the sender turned it into a job. Another job I don't have time for in my already busy day. How often do people shrug because they can't share your information easily? Think about your own activities, what encourages you to share? And how easily do you give up? Click to Tweet this Article
Keep reading »

The Worst Thing About Moving My Website to WordPress

Image
There have been many good things about moving my website to a WordPress platform late last fall. And there have been a few frustrating things. I'd been doing a pretty good job of ignoring some of those frustrating things until I received an email from Google Search Console with the subject line:  Increase in "404" pages on daleyprogress.com . Oh no! That sounded pretty ominous. The accompanying graph was even more so. Here's the backstory: all my website links changed with the move . Previously my pages all ended with '.html' and now that's truncated. There's a plug-in for redirecting when people click on an old link out there somewhere, so I set that up for every current page. I also had to move several documents and files hosted on my old site to the new one, and then go change all those links on my various blog posts about them. Tedious, painful work but I thought I had it handled. It turned out I was so very wrong. These '404 errors...
Keep reading »

Colour of the Year for 2018 is No Shrinking Violet

Image
Purple is my favourite colour so I couldn't be happier about Pantone's latest announcement . Pantone says, "Inventive and imaginative, Ultra Violet lights the way to what is yet to come." Purple is an emotional colour and has always been considered a little tricky for marketing, tending toward the sentimental and feminine. I'm looking forward to finding ways to use it in my own marketing. How about you? Will you use more purple in 2018? Click to Tweet this Article
Keep reading »