Send With Confidence
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Time to read: 24 minutes
Ready to get your holiday email marketing campaigns in tip-top shape? We've got you covered.
During the last few months of the year, we tend to burn the candle at both ends. We’re juggling holiday shopping, family in town, end-of-year revenue goals, and email campaigns that need to perform well. That’s a lot of pressure for just a few months.
While we can’t help with the shopping (unless your S.O. wants a super cool email provider), we can help you get your ducks in a row for a wildly successful holiday email campaign.
This post outlines what you need to do before, during, and after the holidays to create a successful holiday email program that will carry you into the new year. Here, you’ll find inspiring holiday email examples, helpful tips, and ready-to-use seasonal campaign templates to make planning nearly effortless.
This guide will cover the following topics:
Make your list and check it twice!
In a time of uncertainty, planning ahead and expecting the unexpected can make a world of difference. Understanding that things can change for both your recipients and you as the email sender can help you approach the holiday season with confidence. Whatever arises, you’ll be able to shift gears and continue providing value to your subscribers.
Consider your recipients and how their context has changed since past holiday seasons. While we’ve seen some progress, the world is still far from normal in 2021. With the presence of COVID-19 altering how we think about travel and social proximity, it’s helpful to keep in mind just how contextual email communications really are. Here are a few examples and questions to ask yourself as you look to create the best holiday email campaigns this season:
On the bright side, 2021 proved that email marketing is alive and well. It’s never been more important to fine-tune your holiday email campaigns to stand out from the competition.
Shipping deadlines are always a big factor in holiday season promotions. This year, it’s possible that shipping times could be longer or more erratic for some shippers.
Considering what you can and can’t control will be very helpful in crafting content that sets appropriate expectations and makes for happy customers.
For example, you may have more luck converting subscribers to customers during the holiday season by relying more heavily on a journey-driven email series vs. simple batch-and-blast offers.
If you anticipate an increase in your sending volume, make sure to increase your volume well before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Delivery or inboxing issues can arise if mailbox providers see sudden, unusual spikes in volume from you as a sender.
Build into volume increases. Only increase volume by 25–40% at a time to prevent big swings in deliverability results.
Don’t wait until Black Friday to start setting expectations and building the path for your great deals and offers. While you don’t want to turn customers off before the holidays start, using the days and weeks prior to cleverly lay the foundation of what you’ll offer (and why recipients should look forward to it) can make a big difference when Black Friday arrives and inboxes overflow.
For insights on how Black Friday email campaigns were different last year, check out 2020’s Unprecedented Holiday Email Sending Volumes.
There’s no substitute for planning ahead—especially when things go sideways. Planning out your sending schedule not only helps you prevent oversending to recipients but also allows you to build in “off days” in between sends. It might be tempting to plan sends for every day during the holidays, but having a couple of days a week where you aren’t blasting offers to recipients is beneficial to your sending. This downtime can be very helpful in preventing problematic volume spikes due to unplanned sends or for resting your sending reputation. You can avoid disaster by studying up using our 2021 Black Friday & Cyber Monday Email Examples and Insights.
When things in the world change rapidly, it’s often necessary for email marketers to change course as well. It could be that shipping realities change rapidly during this time, or your in-store capabilities change, and you suddenly need to update your customer base with an emergency send. Having a day or 2 during the week with lower-planned volumes gives you the ability to do this emergency send without more than doubling your volume compared to your standard high-volume send days. (Note: Doubling the volume could cause delivery disruptions.)
Or, you might see evidence that your messages are being filtered to spam a little heavier than normal. Having a day or so each week to simply rest your reputation during this time can help prevent those reputation issues from becoming even worse. A sending calendar with breaks built in gives you the flexibility to adjust your sending as needed during a potentially chaotic month.
Before you create your first holiday email blast, prepare your email program for an influx in sending. This means cleaning out your list, freshening up your templates, and segmenting your lists with plenty of time to test out any kinks before the big holiday bonanza.
A surefire way of preventing your emails from being delivered is to send them to an unkempt list. Sending to old email addresses or addresses that haven’t engaged with your email recently increases the likelihood of landing in spam traps and soliciting complaints.
Mailbox providers process negative signals to decide how to filter your emails—whether more heavily or blocking your emails entirely. These are all very expensive problems to have during this important sending season.
Ensure that the recipients you send to are the ones opening and clicking your messages. We suggest never sending to an email address that hasn't opened or clicked your messages in the past 6 months. Quite often, it’s best to only send to addresses that have positively engaged in the last 3 months.
If you must send to less-engaged emails, do so at a reduced frequency and consider segmenting those sends to a different internet provider (IP) group and subdomain/domain combination than your engaged recipients.
When things go wrong with email, such as a deny listing or heavy filtering of messages to spam, repairing those issues often requires sending smaller amounts of email to your most engaged recipients in order to correct your sending reputation.
Now is the perfect time for you to identify who your most engaged recipients are.
Should you need to target them, you’ll easily be able to use them as a segment. But why stop there? Now that you have an idea of who in your list are your most engaged recipients, it might be a good idea to give them a little special treatment, like a unique offer code or product sneak peek.
Demonstrating positive engagement to mailbox providers makes getting emails to the inbox easier. Target your most engaged recipients with your offers first, then send the offers to the rest of your recipients 25 minutes later. By doing so, you might just see that more mail makes it to the inbox, and you make more money.
Exhausting your customers with too many holiday emails is never worth it. But updating your preference center with the option to down-subscribe is a safe way to increase your sending volume (assuming you have more valuable content to share) without losing people who dislike the increase in communication.
Include an additional check box on your email preference center page that allows users to opt out of certain types of email or holiday mail specifically rather than just inviting them to unsubscribe entirely. When email subscribers choose this option, you’ll add them to your suppression list (a list of contacts that you don’t send to) until January rolls around. Then, after the holiday dust settles, you can add them back into your regular sending list.
In addition to a down-subscribe, you can also keep traditional down-subscribe options to reduce communication frequency. For example, if you’re sending a daily update, give users an option to choose a weekly digest instead. Your preference center is a win-win because it puts communication frequency in your subscribers’ hands while you still get to send them mail.
Getting recipients to open the message is only half the battle for retailers. The other half is convincing your recipients to take action. One of the most effective methods of engaging recipients is through personalization.
Customize the content of your message to reference a customer’s location, what they previously purchased, or their current plan type. To craft personalized emails, you’ll need to segment your list according to your available data. This does require legwork prior to your holiday sending, so start early to discover any quirks in your segmented lists.
While all of your subscribers are important, chances are there’s a portion of your list that’s more engaged with your emails than others. Consider segmenting these VIP subscribers who have, for example, opened more than 10 messages in the past 30 days (or a higher than average percentage of your overall email sends).
You can then send your most engaged users holiday emails a couple of hours prior to sending the emails to the remainder of your list.
While it’s a great idea to spruce up your holiday sending with fun, holiday-themed templates, test out any changes or new templates before the holiday season begins. If your template doesn’t render correctly across inboxes or devices, you risk losing the confidence and interest of your recipients.
For predesigned holiday templates that have already been tested across providers and devices, explore our email template gallery.
So much goes into preparing your email program for holiday sending, so let’s hammer home the point one more time: Start early! This will give you the best shot at creating an engaging holiday email marketing program.
To find more info on holiday sending, listen to our webinar: Holiday Email: What to Know Before You Send. You’ll hear from our email marketing and email delivery experts about how to make your holiday email program a success.
Make sure your messages are valuable, timely, and in line with the expectations you set during the rest of the year.How do you know if you’re sending too much?
Segmenting allows you to quickly identify cohorts of your list that signed up during the holiday season.To help you identify who may unsubscribe ahead of time, consider segmenting your list by sign-up date and/or source.
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