The holiday season presents a wonderful opportunity to strengthen relationships with both your leads and your existing clients. It is a positive way to remind clients and leads about your company, offer some incentive and build trust. Though we have seen many success stories on how B2C businesses leverage on the holidays (eg: Christmas Sale, Thanksgiving Promotions, Year-End-Sale, etc), not many B2B businesses fully understand the benefits of doing so and often end up underestimating the holidays as a business opportunities in the B2B environment.
Here are two key viewpoints on how you can approach your leads and customers during this time of year to capitalise on the holiday season.
While B2B brands aren’t necessarily selling gifts, ensuring a brand’s message incorporates the spirit of the holiday season with key terms will boost conversions and convert buyers into long term loyalists.
Source: SocialMediaToday, 2019.
1. Relationship-building
Look at holidays as an opportunity to build trust and enforce connections with your clients. Through this, you also can provide them with some valuable information such as opening hours during the holiday season or if any delay in support is to be expected.
Here’s how you can set up holiday email marketing campaigns that puts a strong emphasis on developing relationships.
i. Prepare a themed template and schedule in advance
Being overloaded with urgent and high-priority tasks, managers often think about holiday emails as secondary. However, as a member of the sales team, you should look at holiday emails as an investment into sales improvement in the near future. Spare some time to identify the main holidays during the year and prepare templates and messaging that are according to theme. Make sure the template has a different layout from your usual emails, expressing the core value of your brand through the holiday. Features like Recurring Action Groups may make things simpler by ensuring that your holiday messages are sent on a regular basis on a particular date each year.
ii. Bring value
Don’t bore recipients with generic copy-pasted congratulations. Instead, try to deliver some useful information. Notify your recipients with valuable information such as operating hours or a shift in working schedules to keep them informed. If you’ve had a year full of challenges and your clients stayed with you throughout, express your gratitude and recognition of their loyalty. Holiday emails can also be an opportunity to declare your commitment and vision for the future cooperation and activities you plan to arrange together.
iii. Personalise
The importance of personalisation nowadays should not be underestimated. The more you personalise your message, the more it will resonate with your recipient. Use their name not only in the email itself but also in email subject to grasp attention when your partners view their email box. Marketing Automation does this seamlessly via Email Merge Variables. For example, you can add personal information such as the recipients’ first name and company name. You can even take a step further in this by adding a customised URL (without actually changing the original URL) So that your recipient will see not a generic URL like https://crmleadgen.com/ but instead https://crmleadgen.com?utm_source=Adam&utm_campaign=Email&utm_medium=Email. New digital solutions for business can help you deliver your message in more effective ways. For instance, you can also personalise emails for particular contact groups without having to make several different emails. By sending a single email with Dynamic Content the system will automatically change the contents to meet the needs of the recipient.
Did you know?
65% of business leaders admit to checking work emails on holiday.
Source: RealBusiness, 2018
2. Promotional
Holidays also make good reasons to reach out to your actual and potential customers with special offers and incentives. It may also give you the right context for providing additional value to your clients. Especially, when it comes to increasing usage of certain services or to spread awareness of new solutions.
i. Consider industry-related holidays
Apart from the general holidays such as New Year’s Eve and Christmas, there are also holidays which are not celebrated by the general public but instead are closely related to your own or your client’s business. For example: Cyber Monday (November) or International Programmers day (January 7th). Reaching out to these leads on specific occasions with offers that reflect on their industry specific needs would show that you truly understand the nature of their business and are able to add value.
ii. Time Sensitive
Emphasise that the offer is time-limited to create a sense of urgency and uniqueness. This way you will encourage your partners to act now. You can also schedule time-limited promotions while you are away. For example, it can include discount codes, special bundles, or even free shipping. To attract readers attention work on the wording for Strong Email Subject Line.
iii. Prepare a contact list
Your database may consist of different groups of people with different levels and areas of interest. Therefore, sending out a single special offer to the entire database may not be the right strategic move. Define which group of your contacts are supposed to receive your offer by using their past behaviours as an indicator. Behavioral Marketing Automation systems such as Constant Contact Lead Gen and CRM could help you automatically categorise your leads into lists based on a common characteristic. The Dynamic List will automatically update itself as time goes by so there is no need for any manual intervention.
iv. Plan and drip
Effective email campaigns contain Call-To-Actions within and include a series of emails that are triggered out based on an action taken by the recipient. Eg, opens the email, views the media, etc. As a result, we recommend that you begin your campaign early enough to allow time for these emails to be sent. Email Drip Campaigns will automatically send your selected customers an offer once they have completed certain actions and fit the necessary pre-set criteria.This type of automation enables you to communicate with leads that are interested in your product or service, but not yet ready to purchase.
v. Act and measure
You can stay in full control of important work events during the holidays by setting up Notifications. This comes in handy especially if you’d want to know when a lead fills in the form of your special campaign so you will know if your campaign is effective and if any leads took action. With Constant Contact Lead Gen and CRMs’ Analytics features and trackable links, you will also be able to track the performance of your campaigns in a real time and even the performance of your media assets such as PDFs.
When creating your B2B holiday email campaign, you can choose the most important holidays and create promotional email campaigns with special offers centred on them. In a competitive environment where many companies offer similar products, it is critical to remain accessible and relevant to your clients especially when most businesses are not. With Marketing Automation, you can easily organise holiday-related outreach to all of your contacts and provide effective presence in front of clients and follow up even while on vacation.
What's next for you?
Take advantage of holidays by not only by providing yourself with a well deserved rest but by also creating business opportunities. Once the holiday campaign concludes, you can easily measure the performance of the campaigns and continue conversations from there. Marketing Automation goes a long way in contributing to your company’s growth. Refer to our Guide: Automation Templates to Solve B2B Challenges to see how you can reap the many benefits of Marketing Automation.
In addition, if you are managing your business in Malaysia, discover more about holiday shopping in Malaysia as one of the main characteristics of consumers’ behaviour.
