Email Marketing Practices To Call The Shots This Holiday Season

The holiday season is the ultimate litmus test for all email marketers out there. With every other brand vying for your target audience’s attention during this time, you need to be absolutely on top of your game to taste success. Unsure about your holiday email campaign strategies? Worry not, we’ve got you covered!  Today, we share with you a host of best practices that will help you ace your holiday season campaigns. Read on to find out!

Content Best Practices

• With every passing day, short-form video content continues to grow in popularity among the masses. This reflects well across major platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and the like where the focus on promoting such type of content is extremely conspicuous. Hence, this holiday season, implementing short, engaging visual content in your emails could very well give you a competitive edge over your competitors.
• Focus on rolling out that is tailored for your audience. With hundreds and thousands of emails already flooding their inboxes during this time of the year, your subscribers are not going to take very kindly to yet another generic email coming their way. Shape your content as per insights gathered from historical data.
• Buying behavior of customers during the holiday season is markedly different from the rest of the year. They are more focused on buying for friends and family than themselves. Make sure you take this into account while sending product recommendations. On a normal day, basing recommendations on their past purchases would be an excellent tactic. However, the holiday season calls for you to concentrate more on their browsing histories.
• Don’t shy away from including social proof in your emails. Very few things in this world make your brand look more convincing than a glowing customer testimonial.
• Make brevity your best friend. If you want to grab your reader’s attention, keeping your content crisp and to the point is the way forward.
• Segment your contact list. Divide your audience into different sections based on various parameters such as age, gender, occupation, browsing patterns, position in the sales funnel, and the like. This will allow you to develop personalized content for each segment, increasing your chances of inviting greater engagement in the process.

Looking for some inspiration? Take a look at these examples!

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Design and Development Best Practices

• Attempt to evoke the holiday season cheer and festivities with your email design (while staying true to your brand book, of course). This can be done by using colors or symbols that are commonly associated with the holiday season.
• Make sure that your design and coding abides by all the accessibility best practices (such as sticking to a single-column layout, maintaining an ideal text-background color contrast, employing semantic markup, including the “lang” attribute, and other things). Failing to do so will deal a body blow to your campaign’s reach and visibility.
• Always test your emails before sending them out to ensure they render well across all devices and platforms.
• Use high-resolution images of your products and offerings. It goes a long way toward leaving a strong impact on your subscribers. At the same time, make certain that you optimize them else your file size will go through the roof.
• Steer clear of using JavaScript and other complex CSS/HTML. This is because they do not receive any support from email clients. A comparatively better alternative is to use AMP for email.
• Try to minimize your dependency on custom fonts. Though they certainly electrify your emails, they make it heavy as well. Additionally, don’t forget to declare font stacks while using custom fonts.

Here are some holiday email inspirations that will surely get your creative juices flowing.

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Deliverability Best Practices

• Ensure your audience knows that they will be receiving a greater volume of emails from you during this period. Establishing this transparency will improve your customer relationships by leaps and bounds.
• Stay on top of your list hygiene. Comb your list periodically to identify inactive subscribers, try to re-engage with them, and if they fail to respond even post that, don’t hesitate to remove them.
• Since the holiday season involves sky-high email send volumes, consider setting up a new subdomain to cope with it. Otherwise, if you persist with using your regular subdomain for your holiday campaigns too, there’s a good chance you’ll arouse the suspicion of ESPs and ISPs.
• Have a sound digital infrastructure setup on the backend to prevent the high send volumes from bringing your operations to an abrupt halt.
• Look to it that your domains are fully authenticated.
• Refrain from using spammy words in your subject lines as well as the email copy.
• Give your subscribers ample clarity regarding how they can unsubscribe. Trust us, there’s nothing to be gained by mailing those who don’t want to hear from you. It is much better to let disgruntled subscribers opt out voluntarily than having them report you as spam.

What Not To Do

• Do not make your messaging generic. It’s the easiest way to put off your readers.
• Don’t try to oversell your brand. This is a manuever that most businesses fall prey to during this time in a bid to grab their customer’s attention. However, all this does is invite their scorn.
• Avoid making your emails text-intensive. Holiday emails are better off being visually rich.
• Get on top of your inventory and fulfilment planning. You don’t want to be in a situation where you’re ill-equipped to meet the orders that are coming your way.
• Don’t automatically resend your campaigns to those who didn’t open them the first time round. This will only lead to greater complaint rates and lower deliverability.

Wrapping It Up

While the challenges of the holiday season may seem daunting, if you play your cards right you can boost your revenue to no end. We hope the tips and tricks shared above help you create a holiday campaign that leaves your customers mesmerized!


Source: 10 Experts Share Tips on Holiday Email Marketing – Email Uplers

Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.

Email marketing stock image by ESB Professional/Shutterstock