It’s that time of the year again and the holidays are upon us. Now is the time for cigar shop owners to be aware of those wrapping up. If you’re like us, starting to do their holiday gift hunting. We have put together a little guide to help you use email marketing. This is to boost your holiday cigar sales this year.
It is no secret that in this digital world, more and more businesses are turning to technology. Mainly, to get their products out there. This time of year, it is crucial to use every tool at your disposal to maximize holiday revenue.
How Email Marketing Boosts Holiday Cigar Sales
Everybody is looking for deals during the holiday season. More importantly, everyone is looking for a reason to spend money. Buying gifts for a friend or loved one? Just looking for some sweet cigar deals for themselves? Take note that they are already in the mindset of spending money. Now it is making it that much easier to entice customers into big sales. It also makes your holiday marketing campaign that much more effective. Are you taking advantage of this holiday spirit? You can create one email that can easily reach hundreds of thousands of customers or potential customers.
What’s the bottom line for email marketing? It puts your business, and your deals, directly in front of a massive audience. Most people throughout the day carry two, maybe three devices at a time that can receive emails. Between smartphones, laptops, and smartwatches, emails are pretty unavoidable. Additionally, even if the email is not opened, using a catchy subject line can still put your business in the front of the reader’s mind, which could result in a purchase shortly after seeing it. Done properly, email marketing is a vital tool in a cigar shop owner’s arsenal.
Tips and Tricks for Email Outreach
Now you know that you need to use email marketing to reach your clients. So now, what is the best way to go about doing that? We have put together a few tips on how to maximize your email marketing outreach.
- Try using two different email campaigns.
One for existing customers, and one for new potential customers. This way your current customers can see one campaign where you are offering deals, giving announcements and other things that somebody already familiar with your shop will find useful, while also having a separate campaign used to get new or potential customers familiar with you and your shop. - Offer sign-up incentives.
This is important for an e-commerce presence. Sign-up incentives for your email campaign on your website’s homepage can lead to a huge increase in email signups. Something on your website, whether it be a pop-up when a customer first enters the site, or a text box beneath a search box, that offers a place to sign-up for the email list in return for an incentive.
In this case, you can place a special deal for marketing cigars for the holidays. - Cart Abandonment Reminders. Think about how many times you have been shopping online, and you add a bunch of stuff to your cart, and when you leave the website and the full cart, never return to it. Especially during the holidays, virtually every shopper is doing this at some point. So a great way to boost holiday cigar sales is to use emails to remind customers that they have abandoned their cart on your website, and invite them back to complete the purchase. Sometimes people abandon carts to shop around other sites and come back, but sometimes they completely forget, so an email reminder can help reduce lost sales.
- Use a loyalty program. When it comes to cigar sales during the holidays, most shops tend to see quite a few new faces, whether it be in-store, or online. By implementing a loyalty program that requires an email to sign up, you are not only making it more enticing for new customers to return and become regulars, but you now have their email addresses to add to your cigar marketing list.
Why Email Marketing is Crucial to Holiday Cigar Sales
When we think of the holidays, there’s probably a number of different things that come to mind. One of the biggest things for cigar shop owners and shoppers alike is deals. Every shopper is looking for the best deal, and every cigar shop owner is looking to use deals to maximize revenue during the holiday season. But no matter what type of offer, promotion, or discount you offer, it is useless if it does not appear in front of someone’s face.
Of course, that’s where your email marketing campaign comes in. Using the tips discussed earlier, you can steadily build up a list of emails, each one you add is a new potential sale, whether it’s a prospective customer or a reliable regular. One of the most crucial things to remember is that right now, more than any other time of the year, people want to spend money.
Perhaps there is a customer that has not visited your shop or online store in a while. You can make an email campaign to send emails to people who have not visited in a while. You can also remind them that you are around, and throw in a time-sensitive coupon code to get them to return. This strategy of marketing cigars through email is perfect for the holidays, as many people who buy cigars may only buy them once or twice a year as presents for somebody in their life who is a regular smoker. So by getting them signed up once for your cigar email marketing list, you can send them a holiday deal every year, for every holiday, and ensure that your shop is the one they go to when they need gifts.
How to Maximize Efforts to Capture Emails
Capturing emails is the bread and butter of your holiday marketing campaign. There are many ways to do it, and some are extremely simple. For starters, just ask. “Would you like to sign up for our email newsletter? You can be the first to know about exclusive deals and offers.” An extremely simple statement like that is something you can implement into your website or just put on a post-it note by your shop’s register to remind your employees to ask every single customer that comes in about it.
The best way to get people to sign up for emails is to give them a clear, immediate incentive to do so. For example, put something on your online store or upfront near your shop’s register offering some type of discount, such as 10% off your purchase today for signing up for the newsletter. This ties back to a tip we gave earlier about getting holiday shoppers signed up. Most holiday shoppers may not want to take the time to give their email addresses. This is true if they only visit once or twice a year to buy gifts from that store. But, during the holidays, everyone takes every discount they can get.
Email Marketing Will Boost Your Holiday Sales
Email marketing is exceptional at getting new eyes on your store and products. It is enticing old customers to come back by getting deals and offers directly in front of them. Take note that this is wherever in the world they may be. It is an exceptional tool to use to increase your holiday cigar sales. With that, we can help you get it set up. To learn more and to get started making bigger sales and bringing in more customers this holiday season, contact us at Cigarketing at https://cigarketing.com/contact/.