As a marketer, you might shy away from sending out an email campaign on a major holiday. After all, it is reasonable to assume that most of us aren’t firing up the laptop on a day made for celebrating with family and friends. However, in an increasingly mobile world consumers are still connecting via mobile devices, making a holiday a surprisingly good time to send your message.
Elise Menold, Marketing Director at Lexington Podiatry, has put this theory to the test using responsive design in email campaigns. “After last year’s luck with holiday sends, I was more inclined to test out different holidays to see if the same held true,” she says. Lexington Podiatry aims to send emails on a monthly basis, but with no hard deadline. “This allows us to be more flexible and send when the information is truly relevant,” says Elise. “Sometimes, that just happens to be right on a holiday.”
Is anyone paying attention?
Elise says they were not disappointed in the campaign results. “The phones were ringing off the hook and we learned that maybe we ought to have more than just a skeleton crew manning the phones on New Year’s Eve if we’ve sent an extended hours campaign the day before,” she says. “It was excellent to see the conversion – the open rate was high quickly and the call-to-action worked. Some clicked through to make an online appointment, but many more picked up the phone to call and make an appointment.”
More than just email
And emails aren’t the only thing you can send on a holiday as part of a successful campaign. We helped several clients pre-schedule social media posts and launch special blog posts for Thanksgiving. Monitoring of these posts showed that audiences were indeed engaged with the material, despite or perhaps because of the holiday.
Keeping this in mind, now is the time to think about responsive design Christmas and New Year’s campaigns. Would a December 25th send benefit your message?