New year, new me – right?

Chances are, your competitors are leveraging the craze around New Year resolutions, goal setting, and the overall enthusiasm that comes from a new year to run promotions to their audiences.

These time-based email campaigns usually take weeks to prepare and schedule. Don’t worry, you can still run those campaigns even if you didn’t plan them in advance. That’s also where AI copywriting skills help you (and AI ethics).

If you want to run a successful New Year’s email promotion, you need to decide if you want to run a limited-time discount or add limited-time bonuses, create a sense of urgency in your emails, personalize the sales campaign based on interests and past purchases, showcase social proof, and make it easy to purchase.

Let’s have a look at how you can make that happen inside ConvertKit, my email platform of choice.

Note that these tips also work for other email platforms.

Step 1: Create a new campaign inside ConvertKit

The first step is to create the actual email that goes out to your email list. Here are a few thoughts on how you can structure this sales email:

1. Offer a special New Year’s discount: You might want to offer a limited-time discount on your offers to encourage people to make a purchase. You could also offer a bundle deal that includes additional resources or materials.
2. Create a sense of urgency: Let your subscribers know that this is a time-based promotion using statements like: „New Year’s sale ends at midnight!“ or „Last chance to get [course name] at this special price!“ – You can use Deadline Funnel to trigger these deadlines reliably.
3. Personalize your emails: Go beyond „Hi FIRSTNAME“ and personalize the campaign based on past purchases and interests, to effectively sell the right offer to your subscribers.
4. Offer a bonus for purchases made before the deadline ends: Consider offering an additional resource or bonus material for anyone who purchases your course before the holiday. This could be an extra video lesson, a downloadable workbook, or access to an exclusive community.
5. Using social proof is important in this email to create trust and credibility. Testimonials or case studies can help encourage hesitant prospects to make a purchase.
6. Make it easy to purchase: Include clear calls to action in your emails and make it easy for people to purchase your course. ConvertKit lets you place buttons in your emails.
7. Exclude subscribers who already bought the product you’re promoting. Based on tagging, you should make sure that you don’t pitch a product to somebody who already bought it.

These are obviously just ideas for what can go into the email. In any case, you’ll want to avoid these five mistakes in your emails.

Step 2: Set tags as your subscribers click on the links in your campaigns

This step is crucial and is often overlooked.

Tagging subscribers based on the links they click allows you to better guide them through the buyer journey.

In email marketing, tags are pieces of code that are inserted into an email template or campaign to track specific actions or data.

They can be used to track things like the number of opens, clicks on links, or conversions that result from an email campaign – if you aren’t using them yet, you are missing out and leaving money on the table.

There are several different types of tags you can use in your campaigns and automations, including:

1. Open tags: These tags track when an email is opened by a subscriber. These tags have lost a bit of their relevance with iOS privacy updates and other email servers automatically opening each email to decide whether it’s spam or not. Still, they’ve got a use case.
   
2. Click tags: These tags track when a recipient clicks on a link within an email. They usually include a unique URL that is different from the one in the link itself. Inside ConvertKit, you can even update URLs in your campaigns after you sent the campaign (if you’re on the highest plan).

Inside ConvertKit, you can add automated rules easily which apply tags based on link clicks or other actions done by your subscribers.

Use cases for tags could be:

1. A/B testing: Tags can be used to track the performance of different versions of an email campaign, allowing you to determine which version is most effective. For example, you could use tags to compare the open rates or click-through rates of two different subject lines or call-to-actions.
   
2. Segmentation: Tags can be used to segment your email list based on certain criteria, such as the recipient’s location or the type of products they have purchased. This can allow you to send more targeted and relevant emails to different groups of recipients.
   
3. Lead generation: Tags can be used to track conversions from an email campaign, such as when a recipient fills out a form or subscribes to a newsletter. This can help you to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts in terms of generating new leads.

Re-engagement: Tags can be used to track the activity of inactive subscribers and send targeted emails to try and re-engage them. For example, you could use tags to track the last time a subscriber opened an email and send a targeted email to those who have not opened an email in a while.

Step 3: Follow up automatically with targeted campaigns

Using the tags from Step 2, you can set up targeted campaigns that automatically follow up with the subscribers who clicked on the link to your offer but did not purchase it.

You can strike the iron while it’s hot in this case and take advantage of the current state of your subscribers who are already familiar with your offer but need a little nudge to pull the trigger.

The beauty of these targeted campaigns is that they can convert extremely high.

I have just set up a new campaign a few days ago before writing this article and this is the report:

Remember that you only write those emails once and then you can plug this targeted sales campaign into various spots in your email marketing strategy.

Whenever you drive traffic to the product’s landing page and your subscribers don’t convert into buyers, you can funnel them through a targeted nurturing or sales campaign.

If you need help with setting up your email platform like this, have a look at my Email Superpower program. I’d love to work with you!