Should you take a break from emailing your subscribers during the festive period? And should you send something different in your New Year's emails?

Whether you have or haven't taken a break from your email marketing over the last few weeks, here are some ideas you can use to get your subscribers excited about your business again (and buy from you).  

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SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:13) Join our FREE Facebook group.
(5:30) Should you take a break from your email marketing during the festive period?
(8:30) Emails aren't just a sales tool.
(12:20) New Year's emails aren't just about New Year's Resolutions!
(15:10) What else can you do with your emails after New Year's?
(17:52) Get people excited about your business.
(20:18) Share your real-time experiences and stories.
(22:27) Share lessons learnt and predictions in your emails.
(24:00) Encourage people to take action and solve their problems.
(26:52) Subject lines of the week.

Should you take a break from your email marketing during the festive period? 

We believe that your subscribers can choose to take a break from reading their emails over the festive period if they want to. If anyone decides they’re not going to check their emails during the holidays, that’s up to them. But we continue to email them – our email marketing doesn’t stop.

Plus, if your business is B2C or B2b (i.e. business to small business), if people are anything like us, we check our emails on our phones, regardless of whether it’s Christmas Day or New Year’s Day. If you want something, you’ll probably buy it on those days too! So we don’t think it’s unusual for your subscribers to still check their emails during the festive period.

And even if you’re B2B, and your subscribers use their company email address and you get an out-of-office from them, chances are they're still checking their emails from time to time. So we recommend that you don’t take a break. Instead, carry on with your email marketing during the festive period.

Emails aren't just a sales tool

We see two reasons for that. The first one is that when our subscribers first join our list, they go through automated campaigns. And we wouldn't dream of pausing those. There’s no need, anyway. Because those automations are designed to make sales, even during the holiday period.

The second reason is that our thing is to email people every day. If you promise your list you're going to email them every day, then you email them every day! There’s no special condition for Christmas Day or New Year's Day! 

You see, our emails aren’t just a sales tool. They are a way we show up in people's lives to build deep relationships with the people who want to hear from us. We’re building human-to-human connections between us and the person reading our emails. So we want to be able to wish someone a Merry Christmas in real time. That way, we can also talk about the challenges or opportunities that a particular time of year may bring.

If you help people with something, you don’t suddenly stop during the holiday period. There may be additional things you can help with because of the holiday season. You can use this time of year to push people towards reflecting on what it is you do and help them through the new struggles that this time of year brings. Regardless of what market you’re in, there will be something that applies to you and what you do. People still need the knowledge and the inspiration regardless of the time of year.

New Year's emails aren't just about New Year Resolutions!

Also, in the New Year pretty much everyone’s talking about New Year’s resolutions. And we know that the percentage of people following through is very low. That’s often because the reason for starting a new habit is manufactured and not based on someone's personal motivation or need. We all get told it's the time of year when you’re supposed to pull up your socks, get your act together, and stop putting things off. But if that's the only reason why we set those resolutions in the first place, it's no wonder we don't stick to them.  

So by all means, you can use New Year’s resolutions (or anything that’s happening in the New Year) as an anchor for your emails. Any holiday or celebration can act as a great, pre-existing hook for your emails – people are already aware of and familiar with them, and you don’t have to explain anything.

But you don't have to buy into the whole New Year’s Resolutions hype if you don’t want to. You can apply an unusual angle to it and even play opposites while riding the wave of something that already exists.

What else can you do with your emails after New Year’s?

One of our favourite things to do in January is to take a behind-the-scenes tour of our business. People like finding out what’s going on. So you could share a sneak peek of what’s coming up over the next year. And that allows you to do a couple of things. The first is that you can pre-frame people for what to expect, get them excited, and tease them about the cool stuff that’s going to be happening, such as the fact you’re launching something new. We’d recommend you talk about things that are coming fairly soon though because otherwise, the excitement might dwindle.

But you can also use this as a good opportunity to reset the parameters, the beliefs, and the expectations around your relationship with your subscribers. For example, one of the things we talk about in our welcome sequence (the Getting to Know You sequence) when someone first joins our list is to set the scene and tell them they're going to hear from us every single day. We also tell them they can come to hang out in our free Facebook group, listen to our podcast, or join our main programme – The Email Hero Blueprint.

Even if you haven’t taken a break from emailing your list, you can use this time to reset the parameters and the expectations of what's to come, what you’re working on, and what the New Year means to you as a business and, as a result, what it means to your audience. How does what you do benefit people?  

Plus, if you’re entering a new phase of your business, you don’t want to create a divide between the end of one phase and the start of the next one. Because that almost gives people permission to take a break and switch off, and you don’t want to do that!

Instead, use this time to set people up for what to expect. This is a good opportunity to rebuild relationships with people and remind them that you’re showing up every day (or whatever your email frequency is) with something that’s going to help them move forward. That way, by the end of this year, your audience will have made significant progress with whatever area of business or life you help with.

Get people excited about your business

Telling people what you have planned and what you’re excited about shows them that you have plans. You're not just chilling out, pumping out the same thing over and over again. Instead, you have new, innovative stuff coming up. And even if you don’t know what it is at this stage, give them some specifics. Don’t just talk about “new developments” or “exciting projects” with no further details. That generates zero excitement. There’s no value or emotional attachment to any of that.

What you can do to generate real excitement is to say, for example, that you’re going to make an announcement the next day, which is soon enough. But also, be specific. Are you launching three new programmes this year? Tell them. If you do more, you can always over-deliver! And if you only manage one in the end, that's okay too because what you're sharing at this stage are your plans for the year.

This is all great stuff because it shows your subscribers that you’re re-energised. You’re reconnecting and putting effort into your communication. Your business is evolving – it’s not just a matter of rinse and repeat.

Share your real-time experiences and stories

You can also talk about your goals or whatever's happened to you over the past few days. You may already be doing that in your emails, but if something fun happened during the festive season, and you have bonkers stories to share, don’t miss the opportunity to tell them in real-time. It humanises you.

We don’t believe you should hold off telling a story because it’s Christmas Day and you’re not ‘allowed’ to send an email! Keep it real – people love hearing the real-time experience of you. And that’s another good reason to be sending at least three emails every single week. So people can follow you on this journey.

If Rob sends an email from a cruise ship, we tell people. Or if Kennedy sends one while he’s in Orlando, we’ll say that. We don’t wait. Sometimes the emails are retrospective, but they don’t have to be. We aren’t the type of people to hold off our fun, interesting, novel stories until the New Year. We tell them in real-time as much as we possibly can. And we think you should, too. That way, people are running in parallel with you. They’re going through the holiday season at the same time, and they see that likeness with you.

Share lessons learnt and predictions in your emails

There’s also a big opportunity to look forwards and backwards. For example, you can share the changes, trends, and predictions about your industry or your niche that you can foresee for the coming year. Talk about how that's going to affect your subscribers and give them advice. Or, reflect on the previous year and how that relates to your customers in the lessons you learnt and things you can do differently, for example.

One thing to note if you're looking backwards, is to be sure not to back reference specific emails. So, for example, we won’t mention we sent an email three weeks ago that talked about X. We don’t do that because someone may have subscribed just yesterday. And they wouldn’t know what we sent three weeks ago! But also, they might have missed that email and not know what we’re talking about. And we don’t want to make someone feel like an outsider. But you can talk about the last year in general and the things that happened or the lessons you learnt.

This type of content tends to work well on social video channels and podcasts. And the same thing applies to emails. It allows you to feel timely and present. Just don't forget to link this content back to how it can help your audience.

Encourage people to take action and solve their problems

Remember that before the New Year (so maybe around November or December) a lot of people may have already been thinking about solving a particular problem they’re experiencing. Maybe they're gearing up to do something about it in the New Year. So tap into that. Encourage people to take action – directly or indirectly, your emails can reignite that desire to get it done.

Of course, it’s also perfectly fine to decide that your emails don’t need to take any particular shift just because of the time of year. But equally, we hope we showed you that there are plenty of opportunities you can leverage because of the New Year. It’s the same as embracing any other holiday or occasion, such as Valentine’s Day or Black Friday. You don’t want to run away from them.

If you want some help with all this, we put together a programme to help people get to a point where they never have to wonder what to send, who to send it to, or when. It allows you to become fluent in email marketing. So if you want to make dramatic changes to your email marketing this year, take a look at our programme here. It’s brand new and we’re super excited about it. It gives you all the tools and resources you need to start making email marketing work for you.

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is the eyes emoji followed by the words “Watching you (watching me)”. It vaguely reminds you of the Abba lyrics “Knowing me, knowing you”. Catchy song lyrics are an awesome source for interesting subject lines. So if you were in the relationship niche, for example, you could use “Spice up your wife” or something like that. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

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How To Do Your Email Marketing While You’re On Holiday.

Email Showdown! B2B Vs B2C Emails – What Are The Differences And Who Wins The Ultimate Email Marketing Crown?

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