Email Marketing: Seasonality and the Offseason

Posted by Scott Cohen On September 22, 2011 in story time I 0 Comments

If you’re a B2B email marketer, you’re probably relieved that the summer vacation season has mercifully come to a close. The decision-makers will be back in the office, and work can finally get done.

There is an obvious season(s) for work and an obvious season(s) for play—scenarios that don’t just apply to holiday sales for retailers, but marketers in all types of businesses.

I touched on this topic a bit when I wrote about choosing your battleground wisely when it comes to email marketing. I wrote: “Don’t send email when you don’t have. Don’t compete when you know you won’t win.”

These were words that specifically illustrate the need to understand the seasonality behind your product or services. If you know when you compete best, you’ll be in better position to take advantage of your good seasons.

Yet, email still has tremendous value in the “Offseason.” Here are two ways you can extract value from email during the offseason:

1. Branding.

Yes, there’s that word again: branding. It can be somewhat nebulous and difficult to track, but sending email to your clientele in the offseason (within good reason—don’t go overboard) is a good way to maintain awareness and cultivate that “top of mind” idea. Your most loyal customers won’t leave you during this time, but those who are on the fence or are “casual customers” may forget about you if the silence lasts for too long.

2. Knowledge Gathering

You can use this time to gather input from your customers through surveys, polls, or any other intelligence-gathering methods you may have. Catching your customers in the offseason may give them more time to think constructively about their needs are and how you can better meet them through your product(s) or service(s).

Who knows? You might be able to create an offseason demand for your product or an idea for a new product that creates year-round demand. You never know.

That being said… it is still vital to develop your offseason strategy with the knowledge that you may not move the needle at all. It’s about using the time and taking a long-term lifecycle view to your email marketing that will hopefully produce the right results when you need them the most.

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