Birthday and holiday promotions

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Birthday and holiday promotions

Increase revenue and fortify customer relationships with timely and personal marketing

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What are birthday and holiday promotions?

For any business that sell B2C products — whether physical or digital — birthdays and holidays are prime opportunities to drive sales and see a significant spike in revenue.

Automated birthday and holiday promotions are the ideal way for you to streamline high-volume promotional mailing to contacts on your list — a one-to-many solution that spares you an otherwise incredibly tedious and time-consuming process, even with a low volume of leads. Birthday promotions are unique product offers that fire automatically each year as a lead or customer’s birthday rolls around. The only prerequisite is that you’ve collected the birthdates of the leads and added them to your mailing list. Whereas birthday promotions fire around a variable date, holiday autoresponders send out promotional content around a fixed date holiday of your choice.

A holiday promotion funnel from start to finish.

What are birthday and holiday promotions?

Donuts with a red glaze and a 25% discount tag.

Why run birthday and holiday promotions?

Proven to boost sales, automated birthday and holiday promotions engage your leads and customers in a way that prompts them to act on your time-sensitive call to action, raising the probability that they’ll buy from you. Not only do promotions such as these warrant extra correspondences or “touches” with your contacts, they’re generally expected from today’s consumers. In other words, all up-and-coming businesses are doing it, and so should you.

Boost customer retention

By sending birthday and holiday promotions, you’re communicating to your prospects and customers that they’re valued. In doing so, you’re not only fortifying your relationships with your valued customers at scale, you’re generating referrals by delivering a remarkable experience. No matter the size of your business, this is simply a must-have marketing tactic to utilize and automate.

Drive more sales with personal marketing

Sending people personal marketing offers on their birthday is not only a great way to let them know they matter to you on their big day, but it’s a surefire way to drive revenue. Why? Because personalized birthday messages are inherently sentimental. Who doesn’t want to treat themselves to something nice on their birthday? Whereas birthday promotions are an annual touchpoint, holiday promotions allow you to engage your leads and customers multiple times a year with special offers surrounding the holidays you choose to recognize — nationally or internationally. Businesses who take advantage of this around the fall and winter holidays can expect a significant spike in sales.

Campaign funnel within the Ontraport App.

Boost customer retention

Drive more sales with personal marketing

Where does Ontraport fit in with birthday and holiday promotions?

Carrying out elaborate marketing tactics such as holiday and birthday promotions is nearly impossible without using business automation to handle the workload. Even the most organized business can’t possibly keep track of every lead’s birthday — not to mention mass mailing all contacts each holiday. Even if they could, it’s typically a full-time job liable to cost your business a staggering annual salary for something an automated system can do.

Automated birthday and holiday promotions are easy to set up and eliminate the hassle of manually notifying each of your leads and customers of a birthday or holiday promotion — saving you an insane amount of time and resources.

Using Ontraport, you’re able to quickly build campaigns to send automated birthday and holiday emails, promotions and SMS messages to your leads on or around either hard or variable dates.

“Who doesn’t love a treat on their birthday? And who doesn’t love to treat themselves for their birthday? It’s because of these behaviors that birthday emails are high performers for RPE (revenue-per-email)”

- Cara Olson, Director of Relationship Marketing

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Examples of personal marketing using Ontraport

Send automated birthday emails

Once leads or customers have given you their birthday on an opt-in form or in person, you can drop them into a campaign that delivers a birthday email right before their birthday. In this email, include a birthday greeting, a link to your order page and a personalized coupon code generated by Ontraport. This coupon code can be redeemed on your website upon checkout — or in person if you own a physical storefront. Then, on their birthday, your leads will receive an SMS message with a pleasant reminder of the standing deal which again contains their personal coupon code and a link to your site. By acknowledging your customers and offering them a discount on your product(s), you’re building a relationship with them that significantly raises the chances of making a sale now and down the road.

Physical gifts

You can use campaigns in Ontraport to thank your customers for their patronage by sending them physical gifts. Let's say you want to send each of your customers a birthday gift. When a customer's birthday rolls around, a campaign action in Ontraport adds that customer's name and address to a weekly fulfillment list which is then sent to your designated fulfillment house. The fulfillment house then assembles and ships your gift to your customer just in time for their birthday and you score some major loyalty points with your customer as a result.

An eCommerce tag with a money symbol on it.

Holiday sale

Instead of simply posting holiday deals on your website hoping that your leads will be inclined to visit your website, send them a big incentive to buy from you. Whenever anyone is added to your list via an opt-in form, order form or in-store purchase, you’ll automatically add them to a unique campaign in Ontraport reserved for the next big holiday you run a promotion for. Once your leads are added, they’ll receive your promotional emails and SMS messages on the pre-set dates. These messages direct your leads to a sales teaser page until the sale goes live, after which it’s replaced by your holiday order page. Once the holiday sale has run its course, contacts will remain on the campaign for you to update annually. This campaign in itself has been proven to dramatically increase sales. People have a hard time turning down deals, especially those that convey urgency.

Branded content

Special events within your company are great opportunities to use Ontraport to send your leads and customers branded content for further engagement with your brand. Suppose you've created a membership WordPress site dedicated to your company's 10 year anniversary using Ontraport's membership feature. As the date draws near, an automated funnel sends an announcement email to your list along with a unique username and password for access to upcoming anniversary content. A few days later, another email directs the recipients to an anniversary blog article on your membership site. Then another article linking to an infographic. And finally, the campaign culminates with an email linking to your 10 year anniversary brand video. This video can then be shared on social media to give you more brand exposure.

Contests

Ontraport makes it super simple to host a contest on or around a particular date such as a national holiday or company milestone. To engage your audience, a contest campaign designated for your contest can send out an announcement email while also adding contacts to a Facebook Custom Audience for you to serve retargeting ads to. Both of these and any subsequent contest emails direct leads to your contest page on which they can enter to win. Using both Facebook advertising and email to reach your leads significantly increases the chances of engagement.

In-store events

Invite customers to your store (or other local venue) for a company milestone celebration using campaigns in Ontraport. Send your leads and customers an event invitation email that includes the date, time and location of your party, along with a link to your RSVP page. To stay on top of how many guests will be in attendance, Ontraport will add them to a fulfillment list that goes straight to your party planner as contacts RSVP. As the date of the event nears, your contacts receive a final event reminder email that yet again links to your RSVP form giving you a final headcount and leaving the logistics entirely up to Ontraport.

Ready to drive more revenue with effective, personal marketing?

Learn how Ontraport’s birthday and holiday promotions can grow your business

Book your discovery call

Ready to drive more revenue with effective, personal marketing?

Learn how Ontraport’s birthday and holiday promotions can grow your business

Book your discovery call

Frequently Asked Questions

What is marketing automation and why is it so important?

Marketing automation is technology that manages repetitive marketing tasks and complex campaigns so you don’t have to. This software allows you to automate your communication with leads and customers throughout the customer lifecycle, from their first touchpoint to post-purchase.

When paired with a CRM that collects data about your leads and customers, your marketing automation software can use that data to deliver engaging, effective experiences across multiple channels. Whether you use email marketing, SMS messages or a combination of the two, marketing automation tools will give you the power to turn more leads into customers — without managing the whole process manually.

What is a digital marketing funnel?

Digital marketing funnels are like road maps that your prospects follow until they eventually convert into loyal customers. You can create all kinds of funnels depending on your business and strategy, however most center around the five customer lifecycle stages: Attract, Convert, Fulfill, Delight and Refer.

With marketing automation, your leads and customers will move from one stage to the next based on their interactions with your business. For example, your marketing platform can bump a contact to their next lifecycle stage automatically after they reach milestones like signing up for your newsletter or making a first purchase. The best part is, it all runs on autopilot after you set it up, which gives you the power to scale faster.

What are some examples of holiday promotions I can launch with Ontraport?

Ontraport comes with a lot of flexibility, which means you can basically run whatever holiday promotions you dream up. Here are a few examples:

Send automated birthday emails with personal promo codes or coupons.
Encourage Black Friday sales with a countdown timer.
Send a personalized holiday card with a coupon code.

See more ideas for holiday marking in this article.

What are some other ways to take advantage of personal marketing?

Even beyond birthday and holiday promotions, there are several ways you can use Ontraport to personalize your marketing. When you collect the right data, you can segment your leads based on their individual interests, retarget warm prospects using Facebook custom audiences, or customize your landing pages to display relevant content for each visitor, and more.

Is Ontraport a good choice for B2B marketing automation?

Yes — Ontraport is a great fit for attracting new prospects, nurturing leads, generating sales and more for your B2B business. We offer reliable tracking and attribution, highly personalized communication channels, and ready-to-launch marketing funnels that you can kick off in minutes. Plus, since Ontraport lets you gather and store more data than most marketing automation solutions, you’ll be able to reach more potential customers and get better results from your marketing efforts.

How do I know if Ontraport is the best marketing automation software for me?

When you’re shopping for a marketing platform for your business, you’ll want to take your entire business into account — not just the marketing side of things. Whether you choose Ontraport or not, we recommend making sure your automation platform includes the following features, at the very least:

A website or landing page builder to share your business with the world online
A system for capturing leads and sending marketing emails
A contact management system (CRM) to keep track of clients and prospects
A payment processing tool to collect orders and charge credit cards/li>

Of course, you’ll probably need more sophisticated tools as your business continues to grow. With Ontraport, you’ll have everything you need now and in the future — all under one roof.

Take a look at our buyer’s guide for a complete checklist of all the CRM, marketing automation and sales features to keep in mind throughout your software search. It’ll help you find the perfect platform for your business (even if you don’t choose Ontraport).

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