ON YOUR MARK...

4th Quarter Email Playbook

Training Resources to Help You Win the Inbox

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The last quarter of the year can be one of the noisiest for email recipients—and one of the most competitive for email senders. To ensure your wanted email is reaching the inbox and getting noticed, we’ve assembled some of our best Q4 content resources below. Use these as your training schedule to prepare for the end of the year or as a refresher to keep you in top sending shape for 2018.

Chapter 1: 5 Golden Rings: Top Tips for a Successful Holiday Email Program

Learn about 5 key strategies, like the below, that will ensure you get the most out of your holiday sends without risking unwanted consequences come the new year.

Chapter 2: Send Time: When Should I Send My Email?

Getting your emails to the inbox during noisy Q4 can sometimes be a challenge…especially if you’re not optimizing your send times. Take the following advice from our Manager of Delivery Consulting, Kurt Diver, and check out more tricks in his latest blog post:

Chapter 3: Holiday Sending Hacks

For those senders who need some quick delivery tips, especially for the holidays, let our Email Delivery Consultants, Will Boyd and Seth Charles, be your coaches.

Chapter 4: Measuring Holiday Email Campaign Performance

There are great, specialized third-party tools like SNDS, Google Postmaster, 250ok, and eDatasource that can give you indicators of success or issues on your email campaigns. Learn about how to use these to your advantage during Q4 in this detailed blog post from Senior Deliverability Consultant, Jacob Hansen.

One of the most important competitors you have as a sender is the recipient’s expectations of what they wish to receive from you.

Learn how to keep this promise to your recipients with this blog post from our Expert Services team.

Chapter 6: Holiday Pre-Send Checklist

When time isn’t on your side, use this checklist to make sure your email campaigns are in good shape for the holidays and Q4.

Chapter 7: The Gift of the Email Preference Center

The best way to get noticed in the inbox is to first earn the trust of your recipients. This starts with offering an email preference center. See Kate and Warren’s top tips for email preference centers (and maybe get a laugh out of it too) in this quick video.

Chapter 8: Email Design Best Practices

Another way to win engagement in your end of year email campaigns is making sure your email templates are up-to-date. Our Senior Design Technologist, Jason Walker, shares his tips in this quick Q&A.

Do your research and make sure you are picking a template that will cover all of your use cases.

Need help jumpstarting your email design? Try out SendGrid’s set of free email templates to liven up your email campaigns.

The best way to get an open on your emails is to have a compelling subject line. If you’re in crunch time for your end of year campaigns and don’t have time to test various subject lines (as you always should!), use the results of our study to help make your winning subject line decisions.

For more subject line tips, check out Email Marketing Subject Line Best Practices.

Use these resources to guide your Q4 sending strategy and beyond. And if you feel like you need a little extra help from our team, check out our various Expert Services packages that can give you the 1:1 attention…and the edge that you need this quarter.

1:1 Expert Help

Partner with our experts to maximize your email results in Q4 and 2018.