When Should an Email Marketer Start Planning Their 4th of July Email Campaigns?

The Ideal Timing for Starting An Independence Day Email Marketing Campaign

The 4th of July is perhaps the biggest holiday event of the summer. As the day draws nearer, people around the country will be soaking up festivals, outside grilling, fireworks and all the trimmings that typically accompany the occasion. While this day sees many people having a blast, it is also a wonderful opportunity for the savvy email marketer. Ideally, you want to start planning for it right after closing out your Flag Day program, which should be around the middle of June. This will give you enough time to plot strategy and prosper from the holiday rush. Execution is crucial, so here are some solid tips that may come in handy when planning your 4th of July email campaigns.

Display Your Patriotism

In the United State, the 4th of July is celebrated to highlight the independence and freedoms American citizens currently enjoy. On this day, Old Glory is sure to be waving proudly throughout the nation. The patriotic nature of this holiday is the perfect excuse for using your 4th of July email campaigns to flash your patriotism. For you, it could be as simple as giving your email template an Independence Day inspired design. You could also craft your offers or promotions around the occasion. At the very least, this approach can help you chalk up valuable goodwill points that you may be able to redeem with our audience at a later date. 

Go Social

For an email marketer, the only thing better than building a campaign around the 4th of July is combing those efforts with other channels. Right now, the ideal channel would have to be social media. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, integrating social media into the mix can provide a way for your holiday offers and promotions to travel beyond the inbox. Luckily, more email marketing software offer social sharing buttons and other features that enable the easy integration of these two powerful channels. The key for you will be creating 4th of July email content  your readers want to share in their social hangouts

Engage Before the Fourth

Of course you want to plan your 4th of July email campaigns before Independence Day, but you can start rolling them out before the holiday actually comes as well. For example, if you have a regular newsletter, you could use it to tell subscribers about festivals, fireworks displays, and other activities related to the 4th of July in their location starting in April. Readers will appreciate this, and may even show that appreciation by giving you their business when you finally do throw your sales pitch.

The 4th of July is a festive holiday that presents a gamut of possibilities to the opportunistic email marketer. Your competitors realize this as well, but that is no reason to not seize the moment. With the right strategy in regards to planning and timing, it could be you who has the edge in the inbox.

What is the Bare Minimum You Should Accept From Your Email Marketing Services?

What is are the basic and most important features of an email marketing service?

Deciding to pick up email marketing was probably a tough decision. Brace yourself because it gets even harder when you enter the process of deciding on a service provider. Not only is this decision difficult, it is also important, meaning you need to set some standards and stick by them. Without further ado, this is the absolute bare minimum you should accept from your email marketing services:

Respectable Deliverability Rates

It would be nice if every message you sent to your subscribers arrived at its intended destination on time, every time. Unfortunately, this is not the case in today’s internet world. There are a number of factors that could disrupt the arrival of your message, and most of them have to do with the nasty, never ending epidemic known as spam. While whether or not your message gets delivered is ultimately up to you, your email marketing service provider also plays a role. It would be a shame if you were playing everything by the book only to find yourself blacklisted because of your provider’s shady reputation. Deliverability is the very reason you need a partner in this game, so the company you have trusted with your marketing should be doing everything in their power to keep your message in the inbox.

Great Support

There are some email marketing services that you just can’t do without. Solid customer support falls in that category. Maybe you need to know why your login ID and password is not giving you access to your account, maybe you have a question about how to import your existing contacts into the system. Whatever it is, you need to know that you can get in touch with someone behind the scenes when that time calls. Some email marketing service providers excel in the customer support department and pride themselves on being responsive and helpful. Others are slacking at best, and this is something you just shouldn’t tolerate, especially when you are paying customer.

To Have All Your Expectations Met

Above all, your email marketing services should be living up to all of your expectations. By this we mean that you should receive everything you were promised before signing up and more. So how could a company fail to live up to your expectations? They could let you down in many ways, including by leaving you stuck with software that doesn’t perform as advertised and worst of all, surprising you with hidden charges you weren’t made aware of from the outset. When your expectations are not being met, it is a sign that the relationship has hit a major snag.

Conclusion

By now, you should know where this article stands on the matter of what you should accept from your email marketing services. If not, the moral is this - never settle for less. Email marketing is a great tool and a company that can’t properly service your needs should never stand in the way of you and success.

Website Analytics

Web analytics can help drive your site in the right direction. Empowering you to target traffic on the site and gain a clearer understanding where your website traffic is going and how they behave.

There are many different web analytics solutions available, there are both free analytic tools such as Analog, AWStats, Webalizer and Google analytics and more advanced and in-depth paid / subscription tools like Hitslink.

Google analytics do provide a high quality free service, with a quick, clean user interface and clearly displayed default and customized reporting. Google analytics also provide free conversion tracking tools for paid search campaigns.

Moving away from the free analytics tools, there are many web stats packages available that provide a very high quality reporting system with detailed information enabling you to measure a wide variety of online activities such as paid search campaigns, email campaigns and display advertising.

Paying for a web analytics solution will also guarantee you're fully supported with any possible issues. Generally analytics support will be done via email, though most providers are more than happy (and can support) phone support.

In an effort to help you choose the best web stats / analytics package for your website we have provided a brief overview and link to some of the packages we rate highly at www.addme.com.
Suggested Web Analytics Solutions

    * Hitslink (Recommended): A very effective web tracking solution and easy to implement, simply paste a small tracking script on your site's pages and start viewing reports within seconds. There are two versions available, HitsLink Enterprise and Professional.

    * GoStats: Provides real-time web statistics and analytics which can give you immediate insights into your website's performance. Started in 1999, GoStats provides a wealth of data which most free stats systems cannot provide.

    * Google Analytics: Google rolled out this analytics platform out in 2005. Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free web stat tools currently available and definitely worth a look.

    * ClickTracks: Known as one of the higher end web analytics solutions, great for search marketers and search engine optimizers alike. Click tracks gives the user a deep insight in to campaigns, site navigation patterns, PPC, SEO and ROI stats instantly.

    * WebTrends: The high end corporate web site statistics / web analytics package. WebTrends have been around for some time now and demand a great deal of respect in the analytics market. A very powerful solution demanding a high price.