The Importance of Being Chill
While the holiday season is an exciting time of year that is usually filled with nice gifts, enjoyable company, yummy-food and warm fireplaces, it can also be a scary black hole of deadlines, budgets, events, and end of year projects. (Queue the Grinch!)
Sometimes all that built up stress is enough to make you sprint into the new year and by-pass all of the opportunity lurking within the holiday mumbo-jumbo.
Opportunity!?! What do you mean?
You know all of those holiday emails offering sales and other examples of messaging? They are ripe with examples of proper (or poor) segmentation, appeals, imagery and ideas. Reading through your inbox is a great opportunity to re-think your end of year messaging.
Let’s look at two examples.
Extend an Offer
You don’t have to wait for a “special day” to give your audience a deal. In fact, extending offerings and giving users time to make a donation, purchase a ticket to an event at a special price, or buying a product at a discount can make them feel relieved because they don’t have to act immediately. You soften the ask, by giving them freedom to act at their convenience, provide them savings, and open the door for follow up communications. This particular example is nice, because I feel like I’m getting the perks of Cyber Monday, even though I didn’t get to partake in the action two days ago. This is also a personalized image. Two thumbs up for PayPal on this message.
Easy on the Eyes and Brain
Maybe it’s just me (but probably not) I need LESS choices this time of year. Pick one (maybe two) goals for your email campaign and follow through. This email I recently received from RoadID (which is a product I completely support!) gives me a migraine. I can’t decipher through the tons of messages and offerings and images in this one email. Do I get 10% off? Free shipping? Gift cards? Gift ideas at different levels? Enter the holiday giveaway? It’s just too much. Remember, if you are trying to chill out this holiday season, readers may want to do the same.
This holiday season, please do everyone a favor. Be thoughtful, give me a great deal, a nice image and keep it simple. We could all use a little more chill.
