The holiday season is almost upon us and while marketers and salespeople give the last few working weeks of the last quarter a jolt to drive maximum ROI, this is a time for marketers and sales teams to get together and identify fruitful tactics that can help drive successful nurtures during this season. 

We live in a marketing world where marketers need to treat their subscribers and potential customers as more than just meagre email addresses. The holiday season is abound with far too many sales-heavy and promotional email campaigns, but this is where smart marketers can make use of a few good martech and marketing best practices to drive appropriate engagement that can lead to closures in the new year. 

A few quick tips!

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Understand the Past Behavior of your (cold/dead) Prospects and Buyers 

If you’ve been cleaning your marketing data consistently, then you will already have a ready list of prospects with details of their latest professional moves. Segmenting prospects who have been on your radar for a while and haven’t ventured into other professional opportunities can actually be considered some very (tasteful!) low hanging fruit for your brand!

What have these prospects been interacting with most (in terms of content on your site), have they been part of any particular nurture cadence or automated follow ups? Or have they been placed down at the bottom of your priority list by now? It helps to have a breakdown of this information…

Now is the time to try and get their attention, there’s a reason they figure on your list at all afterall! Devoting time to understanding where the trail faded off the last time there was a connect and planning a nurture that can drive interest in your brand is a good way of warming this list of contacts that have at some point featured as potential customers. 

You can further use this data to automate a few campaigns based on:

• where they are in their journey at the moment, 
• what they’ve been up to (this requires a study into their social media activity),

Understanding what led them to fall off the radar in the past can help re-engage this list and provide your marketing team new behavioral data that can help you decide whether you should pursue them with the intent of driving a conversion post the holiday season with a fresh new year campaign!

Tie-up with Other Brands to Offer Value-add Programs That Meet your Prospect’s Holiday Needs

It’s now the norm of the game – buyers don’t like to be sold to. They like to be understood and demand that brands interact with them as per their preferences. 

Typical marketing gimmicks that relate to discounts and offers during the holiday season are useful but only to some extent, in the B2C market, a brand can’t think about not chasing potential prospects with automated discounts and offers. 

But in the B2B marketplace, marketers are expected to drive engagement with value-driven content and value-add features that can compel buyers to think about making a buying a decision eventually.

Teaming your marketing messaging during this time with a value-add that is fit for the holiday season will allow prospects to sit up and take notice and interest in what you have to say. We just wrapped up Halloween 2021, but there’s still Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s to plan for!

Based on who your prospects are and where their interests lie; this is a good time as any for marketers to gather these insights from their marketing automation platforms and put in place brand partnerships and offers that are not simply sales and marketing-heavy. For instance, offering a complimentary winter coat or a BIG discount on one (if they were to book a new service contract or subscription with you or book a demo for starters) could be one way to pique interest and drive further engagement. 

Identifying appropriate offers and matching them to what your prospects might need during the holiday season without hard selling should be the key to warm up prospects that have grown cold or gone dead through the year.

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Drive Holiday Greeting Messages with More Creativity and Data!

Your prospects are inundated with offers and marketing promos and sales messages across multichannel channels already. They aren’t looking to read more of these. 

But at the same time, no brand wants to avoid sending the necessary holiday greetings and wishes that go with it. 

This is where brand marketers can take a step back, dive into their data and marketing automation systems to understand what triggers have worked for prospects in the past based on past opens, reply rates and click-through rates. This can help drive marketing messaging that is backed by creativity and data, enough to push engagement and re-interest in the brand to prepare this segment for a potential demo or sales call in the new year. 

Leading B2B brands have known to use everyday interests like the face of a puppy with messaging on the lines of ‘’where’d you go?!!’’ to drive re-interest or bring lost prospects back to them. 

Have a Clear Objective and Process 

The year’s cold or dead prospects are not gone forever, yet. Lighter moments (like the holiday season!) can be used to pursue a quick catch-up, to drive a conversation or simply just to check in with them. Maybe when you were chasing them a few months ago, they didn’t have the right budget or real need for your product or service but will in the near-future. 

Using the holiday season to revisit this list of prospects and putting a clear goal in place, for instance; driving as many responses or online bookings/demos for the new year will allow marketers and sales teams to work together, use their existing data and insights to plan appropriate campaigns that can yield results. 

The holiday season is actually a great time to build a good connection with lost prospects or even new ones. This is where marketing operations-marketing teams and sales people can come to a consensus to drive optimum results before the close of the year!

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