5 Steps to Creating a Successful Holiday Email Campaign, Sta…

A good holiday email campaign can help boost your last quarter sales, but you need a strategy before sending your messages. Here’s what it should include – and how to implement it without burning out.

If you plan to send marketing emails to your customers this holiday season, you have the right mindset. With Black Friday kicking off the busiest shopping period, your business would benefit from the extra visibility in the inbox.

But how do you put together a holiday email campaign that works?

Take the steps below to save time, create offers your audience resonates with, and drive more sales throughout the next few weeks.

#1. Define success metrics for your holiday email campaign 

Before you create your holiday emails, it’s worth getting clear about your goals and what success would look like for your business. This helps you avoid chasing the wrong metrics and being disappointed with your campaign results.

Here’s a list of questions you and your team could answer:

• What is our goal? Do we want to boost overall brand awareness or bring in more sales for specific products?
• How are we planning to reach that goal? What approaches would yield the best results based on what we know about our customers?
• How do we measure our performance? What are the metrics that matter most to us?

Once you agree on these aspects, you’ll have more clarity in crafting your campaign so you can stay focused on what you want to achieve.

#2. Determine your offers

Coming up with an attractive offer is at the core of your holiday email campaign. You can have perfect execution, but your efforts will be in vain if your audience doesn’t resonate with your offer.

So, how do you create an offer that entices and converts? Go back to your initial goals.

For instance, if you want to boost sales among existing customers, your offer should entice this specific group of people. Alternatively, if nurturing new leads is your main goal, you can start by sending a series of educational emails to this segment – before going with a hard sell.

Here are some offer examples to consider, depending on your audience and their journey with your brand:

• Early discounts
• Higher discounts before, during, and after the holidays
• Free shipping
• A discount + free shipping combo
• Free product samples
• Gift cards and coupons

#3. Validate your list and authenticate your emails

Creating relevant offers for your prospects and customers is vital to your engagement metrics. But to run a successful holiday email campaign, you also need to be in good technical shape.

Earlier this year, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft enforced stricter email sending rules, and ignoring them could send your messages straight to the spam folder. The rules state that mass email senders must:

• Keep a low bounce rate (the industry benchmark is under 2%)
• Authenticate their emails using protocols like DMARC, SFP, and DKIM
• Maintain a low spam complaint rate (no higher than 0.3%)

To help your holiday emails go to people’s inboxes, remember to run your database through an email verification service and remove obsolete data. Also, look into email authentication tools and consider implementing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols. These protocols act as security checks, confirming that your emails are indeed from your domain. That will boost trust with Internet service providers and improve email deliverability.

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#4. Choose the right email format

Once you make sure your email list is healthy and your domain security is in check, it’s time to think of the format of your emails. Depending on your business, your emails can be:

• HTML: rich in images showing your products or services
• Plain-text: consisting of text only, with hyperlinks on specific anchors and calls-to-action.

B2C companies tend to use sleek, eye-catching visuals in their emails – and the B2B industry has adopted this trend, too. A holiday email campaign would also be the right time to infuse your emails with some festive designs.

If you take the route of HTML emails, test them to ensure they’re coded properly. Broken tags and design errors can cause your messages to land in spam. Fortunately, you can find reliable email deliverability testing tools and make the most of them before you launch your campaign.

#5. Decide the best sending cadence

Your holiday email campaign plan is almost ready! One more step: how many emails should you send – and how often? Getting your sending cadence right means you’ll get the most engagement.

Here are some aspects to keep in mind:

• Inboxes are crowded. On average, 35% of all emails are left unread, so be mindful of your customers’ time and attention when scheduling your holiday emails. Consumer inboxes will be flooded with marketing messages throughout the next few weeks.
• Reaching out to your email list early will give you an advantage. Consider launching your campaign at least a week before Black Friday to warm up your audience and avoid getting buried in a mass of sales pitches.
• Avoid sending emails on low-engagement days like Fridays and weekends. Instead, study your recent metrics and notice the days and times your subscribers tend to engage with your emails the most.

Final tip: be ready to adjust in real time

Having a smart strategy helps you get more out of your holiday email campaign. But today, we get real-time audience feedback on nearly all channels. So, if your approach doesn’t resonate, you have to be able to adjust in real time as well.

Keeping an eye on your performance is simple: check the reports for every email you send. Open rates don’t paint a full picture, so look at click rates. Are your customers engaging with your content? Staying flexible and updating your campaign to double down on the things that work will make a difference.

Communicate with your team beforehand so everyone – from designers to copywriters – can be ready to tweak and refine your emails. The more you focus on what your customers want, the better outcomes you’ll see from your holiday email campaign.

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