The holidays are the most festive time of year. As consumers gear up to celebrate their favorite holiday, spend time with family, and create new memories, it is also the best time of year when they are likely to spend more money. It would be a missed opportunity not to implement a holiday-themed marketing strategy. More specifically, a holiday email marketing campaign.
Of the holidays, Thanksgiving and Black Friday consistently rank as top days for most email opens, which indicates that people see holiday emails as important. If a consumer has made a purchase or subscribed to your email newsletter, continue to nurture them with gift ideas or suggest items they may like based on their previous purchase behavior.
Graphics in emails can boost conversions and prompt rapid decision-making, but there's a right and a wrong way to utilize them.
Why Graphics Matter in Holiday Email Marketing
Visuals can offer ease and simplicity in conveying information quickly and effectively. Creating digestible content through visuals offers several benefits. They stick out and are more memorable than words. A good picture can make complex ideas easier to grasp. They can even stir emotions and drive action in a way that text alone can do.
Holiday stickers, like our very own sticker pack, can enhance feelings of joy and festivity, getting your customers in the holiday mindset. Stickers can be added to emails to emphasize a key point or takeaway, such as sales, highlights, features, and product restock announcements.
Holiday-themed emails are also aesthetically appealing and can feel nostalgic of the holiday season and evoke pleasant emotions.
The Right Way to Use Graphics in Your Holiday Emails
Before creating email marketing collateral and graphics, consider what purpose the graphic will serve. Be intentional. Are you pushing a product, making an announcement, or building brand loyalty? Whatever the reason, be strategic. You don’t want to overwhelm your reader and customer with too many images or flashy elements. Aim for a clean layout where visuals complement the text.
Also think about how your email will be displayed on different screens. Whether desktop, tablet, mobile.An image that is hard to see on smaller screens, especially mobile, can turn people off. Mobile can potentially distort your image location and aesthetics if they are not responsive in design or size. Most email builders provide the option to preview your email in email or desktop before sending, so make sure to utilize this helpful feature.
Remember, you want to use your graphics as guides to direct your audience to take some form of action. Whether it's a "Buy Now" button or a clickable banner, make it stand out. Also, your text to image ratio should be complimentary. Make sure your email copy flows with your visuals so your audience knows what action you want them to take.
Before deploying your email, you’ll want to do some A/B testing to see how your email template will display in order to get the best response. Test your header images (photography vs illustrations), button colors, product images (lifestyle vs product-only images), rearranging the order of your text, stickers, and images to see what looks best, and what will grab your readers’ attention.
Common Graphic Mistakes in Email Marketing
Be mindful of tactics that will negatively impact your email deliverability. As mentioned previously, using oversized images can slow our email load time or ability to deliver. The same can occur with using too many images in your template. An email crammed with too many images can look cluttered and hard to read. It can not only slow down its load time but also cause people to exit your email before it's fully loaded.
Don’t ignore mobile displays for email either. Always preview how your email will be viewed on a mobile device. A whopping 1.7 billion users check their email on mobile, highlighting the importance of ease of access to your email strategy
Relying solely on images to carry your message can result in poor email performance. If images are disabled or they fail to load, your message should still come across clearly with your email copy.
Tips for a Success Holiday Email Marketing Campaign
Planning ahead before implementing your holiday email marketing campaigns is the best way to ensure your campaigns are successful. The holidays are busy for everyone. Make a content calendar to determine the best ways and times to send your emails. This allows for staying organized and making sure you don’t miss key dates to engage your customers.
Personalize emails so your message can better resonate with your reader. This can be done by leaning on your purchasing insights. Consider personalizing your emails by name, make suggestions based on previous purchases, create a sense of urgency with limited-time offers or last-minute holiday deals. Be careful not to overuse sales and deals as they can start to lose their appeal.
Use social proof to encourage existing and new customers to make a purchase. Incorporating reviews or testimonials can go a long way in terms of convincing someone to make a purchase. Feature any social proof you have when discussing specific products or services, use as a header image, or subject lines.
Track your email performance. Keep an eye on each email metrics to ensure you are improving each time. Test and tweak things in your emails to determine the best type of content your user wants to see.
Optimizing Graphics for Mobile Devices
Optimizing your graphics for mobile isn’t a “nice to have” it’s a need. A must even. We’ve already made mention of the billions of people who check their emails on mobile, especially during the holiday season. Not optimizing email performance for mobile can cut out a large chunk of potential traffic and open rates.
Hi-res imagery can attract more user engagement. Incorporating poorly designed, text heavy or illegible graphics can cause images to be blocked, not providing your customers with clear instructions and call to actions to encourage purchases. It goes without saying you can lose big on making a return during the holiday season.
Aim for straight-forward and easy-to-load graphics instead of complex, busy, low-res or poorly designed ones. Consider the sizing and formatting of header images, in-line images, product images, call-to-action buttons, icons and small graphics. Try to keep header images under 600px wide, in-line images 200px to 300px wide, 100px to 150px for product images and 50px to 100px for small graphics.
Best-practices suggest that image formatting should be PNGs for transparent backgrounds, JPs or JPEG for photographs because of the likelihood of having better quality of small files, and SVGs for simple or flat graphics and logos due to their scalability without losing their quality.
Measuring the Impact of Graphics
With any marketing campaign, you must test your holiday email marketing strategy to ensure you are meeting demand. The metrics you track will be determined by your goals, but consider the following:
Click-through Rate (CTR) to measure how often people click on the graphics embedded in your email, linking to your website or product. A high CTR is usually a good sign your visuals are compelling.
Conversion Rate to track specific actions like purchases, registrations, sign-ups etc.
Engagement Time to check how long recipients are spending on your email. If they're lingering, it might mean your graphics are effectively capturing attention.
Image Load Time for assessing if images are slowing email load time. This can be a turn-off for recipients so make sure your visuals load quickly to keep people engaged.
Mobile Responsiveness to ensure your graphics look good and function well on mobile devices.
Forward Rate to see if people are forwarding your email. Email forwards are good indications that your content, including graphics, is shareable and engaging.
Leverage Google Analytics. It is a great tool for tracking user behavior, like how many people clicked through from your email to your website. You can even set up specific goals to measure conversions from your emails.
Explore Kissmetrics. The platform offers detailed customer insights and can track how customers interact with your emails. It can help you understand the customer journey from email clicks to purchases.
Hotjar or Crazy Egg provides heat maps that show where users click most frequently in your emails. This can be great for understanding which graphics are most engaging and how they navigate your emails.
Key Takeaways
Implementing a holiday email marketing strategy can mean the difference between being profitable during the holiday season and being in the “red.” Creating holiday themed- graphics can be aesthetically appealing, are most memorable, can ensue joyous and festive emotions, and encourage existing and potential customers to buy from you.
To prepare for your holiday email execution, you want to plan ahead, optimize for mobile, consider the large amount of people who use their mobile devices to check email communication, especially during the holidays, avoid common mistakes by not implementing email best practices (minimize large image files, avoid adding too many images, not being mobile ready, relying on graphics only to convey your message and using poorly designed graphics).
Remember to A/B test email templates, design, copy, and formats before deploying and track your performance metrics through click-through-rates and conversions to measure what’s working and what isn’t to adjust and optimize.