There is a big difference between targeting customers and targeting customers who are enjoying their vacation away from everything. As email marketers, we face a lot of challenges while driving engagement and holiday season is one of the most challenging times for sneaking into the inboxes.
Everything on your email marketing plan needs to be inline with a creative backdrop that makes your messages click-worthy, valuable, and interesting enough to click the CTA button. However, it is more complicated to execute such email marketing campaigns. Today I am going to share some insider tips from pro email developers to target subscribers on vacation.
Choose Your Subject Line Wisely
When approaching vacationing subscribers, subject lines become even more important. Remember that people hardly pay any attention to the messages received in their inbox at this time of year, and you will need to grab their attention in order to get click-throughs. With 306.4 billion messages sent and received on a daily basis, it is already overwhelming to scan through the subject lines.
I find that writing short but compelling subject lines with a USP matching with the travelling mood of your readers works the best. It is strongly recommended to use personal, playful, and curiosity sparking subject lines. Below are some examples of attention-grabbing subject lines:
- Partying? You will need to hit the gym soon.
- 50% Off on your favourite sandwiches after you return from the beach.
Use Visually Appealing Email Templates
Email templates play an important role in targeting vacationing readers. I recommend using templates with more images and comparatively larger fonts since it is not a good idea to overwhelm your readers who have their day off. You should also choose cheerful colors for your templates.
Vibrant color schemes that match with holiday destinations will automatically make your email reader-friendly. On the other hand, you can also experiment with various features like interactivity for adding value to your message and displaying your products in a quirky or attention-grabbing manner.
Take Mobile Optimization Seriously
We don’t expect our subscribers to carry laptops at beaches for reading emails like they do at their office cubicles. It is but natural that all chances of your reader opening your message would come from their smartphones.
For targeting your vacationing subscribers, you will have to take mobile optimization seriously and using responsive HTML email templates should be on your top priority. This helps your readers in consuming your message without bothering to pinch their screens with sand struck fingers.
Perhaps mobile optimization will also improve your deliverability rates while ensuring proper visibility of your messages across all screen sizes.
Use A Soothing Hero Image
The hero image is the large picture that sits on the top of your email template with a caption describing the purpose behind sending the message. You can also include other multimedia like GIFs and cinemagraphs to attract the attention of your subscribers and add a friendly touch to your message.
A soothing hero image also helps your subscribers in connecting with your message easily without having to read it carefully line by line. Here too, I recommend using vacation themes to help to mix with the joyful vacationing atmosphere around your reader.
Create Cheerful And Short Email Copies
Your email copies remain equally important to target vacationing subscribers. Even for promotional emails, you will need to change your tone for fitting into the holiday atmosphere of your subscribers. It would be best if you focus on creating cheerful email copies that resonate with the light mood and doesn’t require the reader to invest much time and effort.
This also brings us to the point that we need to keep the email copies short in order to target the vacationing readers. A short, light-hearted, and compelling email copy will go miles as opposed to the normal copies as far as holiday season email marketing is concerned. Remember, emails are the best channel as far as ROI is concerned and keep them action centric.
Complement The Reader Journey
This is an important aspect of targeting audiences who are away on their holiday destinations. Your messages should complement the reader’s journey by providing value around it. For instance, if your customers regularly order monthly supplies from your web store, you can tell your subscribers that you have kept them covered and their supplies will be dispatched on the due date.
You can also push for add-ons to cross-sell within the same message. Understanding the reader journey and targeting the right spots is possible only if you make proper use of personalization and segmentation capabilities of your ESP.
Over To You
The Holidays are the much-needed breaks from daily routines, and you should cater an exclusive reader experience that doesn’t remind the subscribers about their regular life. Add humor, spark curiosity, and match the enthusiasm level of your target audience to get higher conversions.
For instance, you can provide the link to the purchasing gateway right inside the email to add convenience instead of describing your products. I hope you find this article useful for targeting your vacationing subscribers.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies that specializes in professional email template creation; they are Mailchimp experts. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
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