15 Days to Ramp It Up

#SmallBiz Marketing Checklist for the Holidays

Take Your Business to the Next Level This Holiday Season

Today, and for the next six days, we’re challenging you to take our Holiday Marketing Challenge. We’ll help you take your business to the next level this holiday season by giving you new ways to engage customers, promote products and services, and get in the holiday spirit!

Holiday Marketing Tips / Challenge Day 9: Holiday Email Campaign

We’ve talked about Facebook and Twitter posts. Now it’s time for email. If you haven’t done so already, we strongly recommend setting up and using an email marketing service such as MailChimp, AWeber or Constant Contact. Our suggestion at 3V is to start with a MailChimp account for your business. What is it you ask? Mailchimp is free service that allows you to send a quality email campaign to your customers. (There are versions of MailChimp that cost money, and this may be something to consider if you have more than 2,000 email subscribers.)

Getting Started

If you already have an email marketing and newsletter service (i.e. MailChimp, AWeber or similar account), you’re ahead of the game. If you don’t, we highly suggest MailChimp, sign up for the free account. MailChimp is very user-friendly and should only take 10 minutes tops to fill out the information. Once you’ve filled in the correct information, you can import emails from you gmail, an Excel sheet, or type them in manually. You will be allowed up to 2,000 subscribers for your free account and you can send them to 12,000 emails a month. In other words, if you have the max of 2,000 subscribers, you can send 6 email campaigns a month. As mentioned earlier, if you have more than 2,000 emails, you may want to consider upgrading your account to maintain and grow your clientele.

Jazz It Up-Holiday Style!

Mailchimp allows you to choose a pre-designed theme or make one of your own. For the rest of the year, designing your own is beneficial because it lets you choose exactly how the layout of your campaign will look. For the holidays, though, choose a pre-designed theme that incorporates the feeling of the season! For Thanksgiving, you can choose one with leaves or one with turkeys. There are a plethora of Christmas themes from elaborate and shiny to more subtle ones with a white tree silhouetted against a dark blue sky. Hanukkah themes are also available as well as a cute “Tis the Season” theme with snowmen.

Whichever one you choose, the theme adds a personal, holiday touch to your emails. It’s like a digital Christmas card. It shows people that you took the extra effort to make them feel special. You can also add a special greeting to your customers and address it from yourself. Knowing that a business owner takes the time to greet them will make the customers feel they can relate to your business.

Best of luck on your holiday emails! Send us one and show us how you rise to the #HolidayMarketingChallenge

Make This Holiday Season Your Businesses Best Holiday Season Ever – Marketing Tips

3V is publishing a series of valuable marketing tips for the holidays called the #HolidayMarketingChallenge, 15 valuable marketing blogs in 15 days! The last day for the holiday marketing challenge will be Friday, November 27th! After that day, 3V will package up all the articles into one easy to download and print holiday marketing tips cheat sheet.

Holiday Marketing Tips Cheat Sheet

Below is the list of published Holiday Marketing Challenge articles, please do take a minute to read, review and share some of our valuable marketing ideas!