How to Create an Email Automation for Small Business Saturday

Take a deep breath: the holidays are right around the corner. Small Business Saturday is November 25. Are you ready?

Small Business Saturday is the perfect venue for driving sales and returning customers, even if you aren’t a retail business. We at BizzyWeb are big fans of working smarter, not harder. One of the best, low-effort ways to drum up business is by using email automation.  

Simply put, email automation is creating personalized, automated emails that are sent to a contact after they’re added to your email list. Most email marketing programs will let you create automation, but we prefer Constant Contact. Their program comes with built-in automation tools that are simple to use, even if you’ve never tried them before.

(Psst – If you’re looking for help with your marketing and automation needs, check out our $1,000 promotion)

Step 1: Decide on a Goal

Think about what type of promotion you want to run. If you’re a B2C, it’s simple – you’ll want to drive people to your store or eCommerce site on Small Business Saturday. Consider offering deals to entice customers to stop by. If you want to be a true marketing wiz, you could include a special, email-only promotion so you can easily track how many leads your email brought in by how many people redeemed that offer.

If you’re a B2B, you can still offer a promotion even if you’re not selling a specific product. Consider offering special deals on your services for Small Business Saturday. If it doesn’t make sense for your business to offer a discount, you can also use Small Business Saturday as a means to capture leads by offering free, industry-relevant holiday tips to your audience. For example, an electrician could offer a free guide on hanging lights for the holidays. 

Step 2: Acquire Leads

Before you can set up an automation, you need someone to send automation to. One of the simplest ways to get started is by using the contacts you already have. Hopefully, you should already be organizing your leads with lists and tags. This will make it simple for you to decide who you want to send automation to. 

If you want to pull in more leads, you can also use a form or a landing page to capture potential new customers. Check out our landing page for our current promotion to get an idea of how this works. 

Step 3: Set Up Automation

The specific set of emails that you’ll want to use will depend on your promotion, your business and the audience you’re sending those emails to. Below is a guideline of emails you could send for Small Business Saturday. You can (and should!) tweak them to fit your business needs:

• November 10-15: An introductory email, announcing the upcoming promotion. 
• November 15-21: A reminder email about the promotion.
• November 21-25: One final push for the promotion.

Email automation is a true set-it-and-forget-it process. Just plan out your funnels and press “start”: automation will do the rest.

For even more automation tips, don’t miss our Automate Your Marketing BizzyWebinar on November 15. 

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