Have you put much thought into those emails, though? Your business’ holiday emails shouldn’t only promote your brand, products, and services; these messages should also engage customers and encourage them to spread the word about your business. Emails sent to leads and customers during the holiday season, particularly, should have a festive feel.

If you’re planning to revamp your business’ emails, you may still be able to do so just in time for the holiday season. Here are some tips on making the most of holiday emails.

Make those emails functional and informative.

Use your business’ emails for more than just product promotion. Customers will appreciate holiday emails that provide important information such as the order tracking and shipping details. You can also use these emails to remind customers about how they can contact customer service team. You can even create a newsletter on your business’ accomplishments and highlights throughout the year.

Put a spin on product promotions.

Most online retailers send out promotional emails to leads and customers. What you can do to make your email stand out is to focus on the belief that Christmas is a season of giving. Using emails, you can feature gift lists for specific personalities. For instance, you can send emails that feature gifts for fathers or gifts for teenage girls. This can be helpful for customers who have gift lists to cross off.

Send holiday greetings to your customers.

Holiday emails don’t have to be all about promoting products or services. You can also use these emails to get into the holiday spirit and send holiday greetings to your beloved clients. Use graphics designed similarly to a greeting card or take a photo of you and your staff for a more personal touch.

This remains true even if you choose to take a break during the holiday season. The key to taking worry-free time off from running a business during the holidays is to plan ahead of time. Prepare everything at least months in advance, so you can devote the days leading up to your vacation to packing and trip planning. For more convenience, use this helpful checklist as a guide.

Make sure your staff knows what to do.

Depending on the size of your business, you may have just one assistant or a full staff to oversee business processes.  No matter how many staff members you have, you should make sure that each of them knows what to do during your absence. This will help retain continuity in the business’ processes even if you’re not available to physically supervise.

Inform your clients or customers that you’re going to be unavailable.

Aside from preparing your staff, you should also remember to inform your customers that you’re planning to take a short break. You can inform them a few weeks in advance through email, and then send out another email reminder on the matter just a few days before you actually leave. You should also inform your clients on who they can contact while you’re not in the office.

Make the most of your mobile devices.

Even though you’re on vacation, it would be best if your staff and clients can contact you through your mobile devices. Your phone may be able to send or receive email, so you can monitor your email inbox at quick, regular intervals. You may also use laptops and tablet computers to occasionally monitor your website during your vacation.

Not many e-commerce entrepreneurs and retailers remember that building online communities for their brands is possible even without the use of popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You may even find that these social media sites can’t completely fulfill your needs when it comes to community building.

So if you want to enjoy high profits from the holiday online shopping rush, you might want to start building your online community as early as today. Try out these alternative tools for online community building.

vBulletin

vBulletin is widely considered as one of the most user-friendly forum platforms today. Forums are the predecessors of modern online communities. Through forums, your existing customers can post messages and communicate with each other; you’ll also be able to easily get feedback or ideas from forum members. The software itself needs to be downloaded to your website’s server, for a $195 fee per installation.

Aside from a forum-only version of the software, vBulletin offers a community suite. This suite allows forum members to upload and view photo albums, join groups, and participate in polls. Event management and content management and publishing systems are also included in the suite.

Ning

If you want members of your online community to enjoy more features, you can opt to use Ning. Ning is considered to be one of the most versatile community building tools today. Aside from user profiles, forums, and blogs, Ning software also provides event calendar features and integration with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The software’s interface allows online retailers to run ads on their website, while selling merchandise through an online storefront.

As effective as social media promises to be, however, using these websites to engage customers and build brand loyalty takes a lot of time. And, unfortunately, time is something that most online entrepreneurs always seem to be running out of during the holiday season. You might have your hands full just with making sure that all customers receive their orders in time.

The good news is that there are tools that are especially designed for social media marketing management. Consider using these tools to put your social media marketing strategies on auto-pilot.

Squareberry

Squareberry is a great tool to use if you plan to use digital coupons this holiday season. The tool can automatically promote these coupons to your chosen social media sites. You can also set promotion schedules years in advance, a feature that’s helpful for annually recurring holiday sales. The tool can also send mobile coupon promotions to subscribed customers.

Wildfire

If you’re planning to run contests this holiday season, you may get a lot of use out of Wildfire. The tool helps you create campaigns in contest and quiz formats and simultaneously launch these campaigns on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Wildfire also offers a social marketing suite than can help entrepreneurs build custom landing pages on Facebook.

Dlvr.it

Dlvr.it is a useful tool if you subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds of valuable content for your target market. This free tool can help you publish links to the content on your Facebook fan page, Twitter, and LinkedIn profile. By providing valuable content to your target market, you’ll find it easier to engage your leads and existing customers.

One great idea for getting rid of the surplus is to hold a clearance sale. And don’t wait till the holiday season’s over; have a clearance sale during the season itself. A sale can be a great way to clear your shelves of old stocks, especially if you still have some leftover stocks from last season. Here are a few helpful tips on holding holiday clearance sales.

Prominently display a link to clearance items on your homepage.

Make sure your customers and site visitors know that you’re holding a clearance sale. Put a link to the clearance items where site visitors are likely to see it, such as the top of the homepage. It’s also best to organize your catalog so that clearance items are in their own category; this makes it easier for your customers to browse the items you have on offer.

Come up with promos that will encourage sales.

Aside from offering discounts on clearance items, you can offer additional promos such as ‘buy one, get one free’ promos. These will really attract frugal buyers and shoppers looking for last-minute gifts.  These promos can help you move out old stocks while adding to the great profits you made from the holiday shopping season.

Put your efforts into the clearance sale.

Consider the clearance sale as a part of your store’s holiday marketing strategies. Put efforts into marketing and advertising the sale; your efforts may pay off and end up expanding your customer base, adding significant potential for added profits.

This is why the transactional email is a crucial part of your business’ customer fulfillment process. Transactional emails are usually automatically sent out to customers after they order products or services from your store’s site. The quality of these emails becomes even more important during the holiday season, one of the busiest seasons for online retailers.

Before the holiday season rolls around, make it a point to examine your business’ transactional emails. Here are some helpful guidelines to remember when optimizing those post-sales messages.

The transactional email should provide all the order information the customer needs. The email should answer most of the questions your customer may have after making an order. Essential details to be included in the email are an order summary and shipping arrival estimates. Addressing these concerns in the transactional email can help ease the pressure on your business’ customer service staff.

It’s also best if the transactional email features a clean, minimal design. Not only is a simple design more visually appealing, but it also makes it easier for your customers to print out the email if they prefer. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use festive holiday graphics for the email, though; just make sure that the email isn’t overloaded with colorful images or backgrounds.

The transactional email is also a great place to do product promotion, but make sure that the promotional material doesn’t overshadow the important information in the email. Many email marketing experts recommend that the promotional material be located below the relevant information.

If you don’t want to be one of those entrepreneurs, the best thing you can do is to start preparing for the holiday rush as early as possible. This is the only way you can successfully deal with the wave of online shoppers that’s likely to hit your business during the holiday season.

Prepare to over-deliver.

The holiday shopping rush is one of the best times to over-deliver on your customer’s requests. Make sure you’re ready to satisfy these requests promptly; doing so is one of the easiest ways to encourage customer loyalty and turn regular customers into raving fans of your business. Remember, though, that you only have to fulfill the requests that aren’t outlandish or overly demanding.

Bring your A-game.

Aside from over-delivering, the holiday shopping season is also one of the best times to impress your customers. Make sure that you and your staff provide the best service during the holidays; if you have to provide some training for your staff to prepare them, don’t hesitate to do it. Your customers’ satisfaction levels with your business might set the tone for your business’ success for the following year.

Prepare your marketing strategies.

Customers are more likely to be in a buying mood during the holiday season, so it definitely wouldn’t hurt if you bring out your best marketing techniques. Revamp your site so that it’s a little more holiday-friendly by incorporating some holiday-related graphics into its design. You can also promote the use of holiday wish lists on your site, to improve site traffic.

So, for this year’s holiday season, make it a point to focus on your business’ loyal customers, too. Take care of these customers in the same way that they’ve been taking care of your business. You can show them how much you value their business by following these tips.

Promptly address customer concerns

Prompt customer service is always a great way of maintaining customer loyalty. This doesn’t mean only providing quick solutions to customer complaints, but also informing customers of any issues concerning their orders. Coordinate with the carriers and suppliers you work with so that you’re informed of any order issues. A heads up will always be appreciated by customers, even if you do bring unfortunate news. This shows your customers that you care about their satisfaction.

Personalize your services

Personalizing your business’ services goes a long way towards engaging your customers. If you can, send your customers greeting cards during their birthdays or Christmas cards during the holiday season. You can also send them follow-up emails after they receive their orders to remind them that you’re available for any concerns or issues regarding their orders. Thank-you emails after completed transactions can also help you maintain customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Create loyalty programs

Loyalty programs work great at encouraging loyalty in your customers. Just make sure that you offer valuable, unique rewards for the customers qualified to enroll in the program. Consider using customer relationship management software so that you can easily identify the qualified customers for your offered loyalty program.

Email marketing during the holidays can be tricky to execute sometimes, so here are few tips on launching a successful holiday email marketing campaign.

Use a reliable autoresponder service

The autoresponder service you use determines how easy it would be for you to drive your email marketing campaign to success. That’s why you should make sure that you use an autoresponder service that can fully cater to your needs. A great autoresponder service allows you to easily create emails in advance, as well as set customized schedules for email delivery. The service might even offer various email templates for you to personalize.

Make sure your campaign follows the right schedule

Just because you’ll be using the email marketing campaign for the holiday shopping season doesn’t mean that the first email should be sent to your customers on Black Friday. At this point, it’s often too late for your email marketing campaign to succeed. Many email marketing veterans recommend launching a holiday campaign as early as the first weeks of November. This way, your business can get the attention of early shoppers. You should also schedule your campaign so that emails are automatically sent to your customers throughout the shopping season.

Offer a range of products in your emails

By offering a variety of products in your emails, you get more chances of appealing to the interests of your customers. Studies have also revealed that multi-product emails have much higher click-through rates than emails that feature only one product. So your emails have higher chances of gaining better conversion if they contain more product-related links.

This is especially true for the holiday season, when consumers troop to online retailers to buy gifts for the people on their lists. The Christmas shopping season is one of the best times to gather leads and boost sales customer engagement. And one of the easiest ways to engage your customers is through Twitter. Here are some tips that can help you make the most out of Twitter this holiday season.

Don’t forget to completely fill out your profile information

Fleshing out your business’ profile on Twitter may seem like a chore, but this is one of the easiest ways to prove your business’ credibility or authenticity on the Web. Studies have revealed that Twitter users are more likely to follow a business-oriented Twitter account if the account provides a short background of the business. The profile information area is also a great place to put a link to your business’ website.

Give your followers a follow-back

It definitely wouldn’t hurt if you follow some of your customers, too. Try to follow the people who give you the most mentions or provide your business with positive reviews. Following your customers can give them a sense of empowerment, encouraging them to spread the word about your business. This can significantly boost lead generation, especially during the holidays.

Get to work on posting those tweets

The best way to maximize Twitter for the holiday season is to be active in posting tweets about your business. Tweet about your business’ special holiday offers, such as discounts, free shipping, or free gift-wrapping. You can also use Twitter to spread the word about your store’s coupon codes or promo codes. Be prudent about tweeting, though; experts say that retailers are best off tweeting 20 times a day, at most.