Number 1: Sending Out Invitations

How and When to Tell Your Customers About Promotions

Communication is key during the seasonal of selling, and there are a variety of means at your disposal for reaching out to your customers. You may be familiar with some, but there are many you may not be aware of, yet. One such communication tool is push notifications.

Push notifications have long been lauded by app publishers as one of the best ways to communicate with people (Do you have an app for ESPN? Push notifications are those messages you get on your phone that let you know the Red Sox are winning). However, Google recently enabled them for the web via its browser, Chrome.

For a person to receive push notifications, all they need to do is opt-in on your website and then have Chrome running on their computer or phone. You can then send short messages — it’s best not to write the entirety of War and Peace in a push notification — to your customers to let them know about any special holiday promotions you’re running.

It’s important to note that you’ll want to enable this feature on your site as far in front of the holiday season as possible. Much like with an email or newsletter list, the more people you have subscribe to your push notifications the better. A large following is key to boosting yuletide engagement. And when used properly, push notifications can get a whole lot of engagement.

A study by PushCrew yielded some astonishing results when it came to push notifications:

“The opt-in and click rates are amazing! Some…have seen an opt-in rate of 40% (10X the rate at which an average email list builds, and 20X the rate at which an average Twitter list populates) and a click rate of 20%.”

Tip: Push notifications make a great tool for communicating with your customers, but you can overdo it. Be careful not to send out too many in a short amount of time, or your customers may start to ignore your messages.

And speaking of email marketing strategy, this is should be another vital part of your marketing during the holidays. Though not as new and revolutionary as push notifications, email marketing is an effective tool for reaching out to your customers to highlight special offers and let them know about what’s going on with your business.

One of the best parts of email marketing is that, unlike with push notifications, character and word counts are less of an issue. Once again, you don’t want your message to be too long, but you can communicate a lot more ideas and direct your customers to a lot more places on your website.

Here are a few big things you should keep in mind when preparing holiday email blasts to your customers:

• Subject Lines — Try to keep your subject line short and interesting. Your email is no good if your customers don’t open it, and a long, boring subject line will get a one-way trip to the trash folder.

• Body — Relevance is the most important thing in the body text of your email. Extra information is just that — extra. It isn’t needed and your reader’s attention span is pretty short. So try to keep it brief, while also maintaining a personal and friendly tone. People like that kind of thing.

• CTAs — CTA stands for call-to-action. This is the thing you want your reader to do. Often times you see these in the form of a button or link at the bottom of an email. Though you can give someone an offline CTA (e.g. Visit Our Store Today!), it’s a better idea to give them something to do right in that very minute (e.g. See Our Holiday Specials). Sending people to your website, blog or a landing page goes a long way towards boosting customer engagement.

Both push notifications and email marketing are largely one-way communication tools. Your customers have signed up to receive messages from you, but there isn’t really a way for them to reach back out. This is why it’s and blog, especially around the holidays. Everyone is getting online to share pictures of family get-togethers and connect with
far-flung friends across the world. So it kind of goes without saying that Facebook is a place you want to be.

Nobody is saying you need to be commenting on the photos of people who have liked your business’ page, but you should be posting regularly to remind people you’re around.

In addition to plain text status updates, it’s also a good idea to post content that people will want to share. Infographics, interesting articles or videos from around the web, and links to your blog are all good ideas, but probably the most valuable is your blog.

Why? First, a blog is great for SEO. Google loves original content and a blog provides you with the opportunity to write as much as you need, while also working in those all-valuable keywords. Second, it’s very good way to start a conversation with your customers about relevant holiday topics. For example, if you run a bar and restaurant, a good blog topic would be “5 Christmas Drinks You Need to Try Before New Year’s.” Not only is this likely to get shared around on social media, but there’s a good chance you’ll be able to speak directly with your customers via the comments.

We promised 6 Ways : Preparing Your Website for the Holidays is Just Like Planning a Party, so stay tuned for tomorrow on Number 2!

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