According to Adweek, the average consumer spends nearly $500 at retailers over the Memorial Day weekend, in between barbecues and the beach. Email is one of the top ways to reach these customers, who often are waiting for good Memorial Day deals. Before you fire up the grill or pack your beach bag, here are five ways to optimize your Memorial Day sales emails and capture a chunk of those consumers.
Before you decide on a Memorial Day promotion, take a look at visitor data for the past few months. Use analytics tools to view demographics, as well as what visitors have responded to in the past. Your data will help you find popular products that are likely to drive sales or find products that aren’t moving as quickly so you can discount them and get rid of excess inventory.
Customers wait all year for Memorial Day sales. When you’re creating your promotion, consider what types of items you’re selling and what types of promotions will be most effective for your customers. Wharton marketing professor, Jonah Berger, says that understanding the psychology of discounting can help you create compelling promotions for your customers.
For example, if you sell big-ticket items, like $2,000 bikes, your customers may respond better to a $500 discount rather than a 25% off discount because it sounds like a much better deal. If you’ve noticed that e-commerce visitors frequently abandon their shopping carts, a free shipping promotion may work better than a discount.
Want to make sure you hit the right visitors at the right time? Break your email list down into segments, and create promotions specific to those segments. Here are a few ways you can do that:
By location. When you segment your visitors by location, you can provide promotions geared toward their needs. This also helps you focus your marketing on defined areas and use messaging that resonates for visitors in different areas, particularly regions with cultural differences. For example, visitors in the South associate summer with sweet tea and crawfish, while visitors in New England think of lobster rolls and Cape Cod.
By user behaviors. Segmenting email lists by user behavior can increase conversions because it allows you to target different audiences with different offers and messaging. For instance, you could offer email subscribers who haven’t purchased anything a bigger discount to get them in the door.
By age. Different messages resonate with different generations. If you’re promoting to Gen X customers, you can focus on appealing to their sense of security and need for authenticity. Meanwhile, Baby Boomers respond more to upsells and tend to be more loyal to brands.
Now that you’ve segmented your email list, use personalization to better engage your subscribers. Dynamic content is content that changes based on user behavior and interests. With email marketing, you can use dynamic content to personalize different parts of your email campaign, from personalizing the subject line or adding in a customer's name in the body of the email to more advanced personalization options like referring back to a product that they previously purchased.
For example, if you’re an apparel company, you could add their name to the subject line to encourage them to open the email, and also refer back to a previous item of clothing they've purchased to offer them a targeted promotion. While personalization occasionally gets a bad rep, if done poorly, the reality is that it works: personalized email subject lines get a 26% higher open rate and personalized emails deliver 6X higher transactional rates.
Finally, always test your campaign offers. If you haven’t done a lot of Memorial Day digital marketing campaigns in the past, or they’ve fallen flat, use this year as an opportunity to test out different tactics like tweaking subject lines and promotional offers to learn what resonates best with your customers. Choose a theme for the campaign, then create two different subject lines or two different promotional offers. Send one version to half of your email list, and the other version to the other half and see which performs better. Many email marketing platforms offer simple A/B testing setups that make testing headlines and email copy incredibly easy.
Remember that most retailers are offering Memorial Day sales, and your customers are going to be inundated with email offers. Optimize your Memorial Day sales campaigns by leveraging your existing audience and customer data, choosing a compelling promotion, segmenting your email list, personalizing emails, and testing to see what drives engagement and sales.
Last updated on September 20th, 2023.