Christmas Email Marketing Ideas and Examples

Feature a collection of products in an email gift guide

Including a holiday gift guide in your Christmas campaign is not a new idea. Many marketers do it, but few do it well.

The Christmas season can be overwhelming and so your subscribers are looking for help everywhere. They’re more likely to see your products in an email before going to your website. Offering them a gift guide also allows you to spotlight items your Christmas shoppers might not find on their own.

Organize your guide by variables that make sense for your brand and guide shoppers without overwhelming them with too many unrelated choices. A few gift guide ideas for you to consider:

• Price (low, medium and high)
• Persona (young sporty girls, intellectual men, daredevil college students, bookworms)
• Interests and ability level (books, games, specific sports, cooking, novice to expert)
• Product types or categories that cover a cross-section of your merchandise line.

You can create a single email template for your Christmas gift guides and then adapt the content based on which segment of your email list you’re sending the guide to so you end up with different Christmas templates for the next year.

Lastly, take into account early shoppers as well as last-minute gift buyers and send a guide both well before Christmas and right pre-Christmas.

Send "white space" email campaigns

A “white space” email contains a message that isn’t overtly promotional and gives your subscribers a little break between all of the Christmas sales emails.

Promotional Christmas emails are as much a part of the holiday shopping season as long lines and fighting over the last $24 TV in the local discount store are. While they might hate it, subscribers have also come to expect them. “White space” emails give you a valid reason to be in your customers’ inboxes with something other than a “buy me” message, and buyer’s guides are an excellent vehicle for this.

Different from gift guides, buyer’s guides are set up to help shoppers who don’t know the ins and outs of tricky products. Your goal is to guide your customers during their online shopping, and helping them buy the right present is a great way to do that.

Create a gift card campaign for pre- and post-Christmas

Giving a gift card is often seen as a low-effort, last-minute gift option. The people who work with your customers on the front lines, whether at a cash register or computer terminal, will tell you differently. Having a salesperson promote gift cards at the right time can snatch a sale out of the jaws of defeat when a shopper just can’t decide or sees nothing else they want.

Devote at least one email earlier in the holiday season to an end-to-end promotion of your gift cards. Promote their flexibility and encourage their use with a step-by-step guide to buying and redeeming them. Be sure to highlight what they cannot be used for to avoid disappointing recipients.

It’s also worth noting that gift cards have been the most requested gift for 9 years in a row! Yet, surprisingly, the volume of emails promoting them drops on Christmas and the following days. This is your chance to stand out.

For example, many of your subscribers may have received a gift card (e.g. Visa, Amex) that they can use to purchase products online. With their Christmas gifts now unwrapped, it’s likely your subscribers didn’t receive that one item of yours they badly want. With their new gift cards lying around, now’s the time to email them!

Help customers succeed

Your holiday email marketing might focus mainly on extracting as much cash as possible from your customers’ wallets (don’t be embarrassed to admit this!). But, as we explained in Strategy #2, you’ll do better when you help your customers shop efficiently and effectively during this time of the year.

Emails devoted to customer service topics offer useful breaks in your promotional cycle. Some marketers include this information in an early-season message while most make it a regular section in their holiday season emails.

Topics to include:

• How to buy, give and redeem gift cards
• Shipping deadlines and policies
• Contact info and policies for returns, problems and other inquiries
• Store locator
• Store hours and policies

Providing them with all of the practical information they need to buy their Christmas presents might just convince shoppers to buy them from you.

Say "thank you"

It’s a simple thing. But not enough email marketers do this. Even though some recipients didn’t buy, at least many of them opened your emails. After a year of saying “Buy this,” a message that says “Thank you” is appropriate and fits well with the holiday spirit. It might even prompt a lapsing customer to come back and check out your site again.

If you do send a thank you email newsletter for Christmas, consider upping your creative game to make the other thank you emails pale by comparison. Opt for an eye-catching design that holds on to that Christmas cheer a little longer. And if it works well, turn it into an email template so you can adapt it next year.

Thank subscribers for their patronage, for reading your emails, and visiting your website. This message can come in many ways – a general message, something over your CEO’s signature, a behind-the-scenes group photo, or whatever fits your company’s brand, voice, culture, or customer expectations.

It can be as simple or as complex as you want. However, it can also be a great way to turn your creative staff loose and experiment with things you’ve been curious about (emojis, animation, video, etc.).

Start early with sending your Christmas email campaigns

Similar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, many companies promote “Christmas in July” (and August, September, etc). Here’s an example Bluefly sent on July 18.

Starting in September, all of your Christmas-themed campaigns should focus on the holiday itself. If you send a “Christmas in September!” campaign, your audience probably won’t be as excited when you start running your real Christmas campaigns mere weeks later.

If you can’t wait to start talking about Christmas, send subscribers a sneak peek like Crate and Barrel did on September 21 with their email stating “Thanksgiving and Christmas arrivals are here.”

The perfect time to start sending Christmas emails will be different for every brand, but you can always use MailCharts to learn when your competitors start sending their Christmas emails and start from there.

In a single year, MailCharts received 2,196 emails mentioning Christmas in the subject line.

Based on the our data we know that:

• 8.15% of emails are sent on Christmas
• 5% of emails are sent post-Christmas
• 28% of emails are sent in the 7 days leading up to Christmas (12/18 through 12/24)

By timing your Christmas emails correctly and following the above email marketing strategies, your brand’s Christmas email campaigns can stand out from the pack.