Is Your Email Program Ready For A Competitive Holiday Season?

Reviewing email programs for the holiday season is crucial to ensure that your email marketing campaigns are optimized for this busy and competitive time of year. The holiday season presents a unique opportunity to engage with your audience, drive sales, and strengthen customer relationships. To make the most of this season, brands should ensure your email marketing efforts are well-prepared, strategic, and effective.

Here are some key areas to focus on during your holiday email program review:

1. Ensure that your automated feeds are actually on and working. You’d be surprised about how frequently feeds go down.
2. Abandon cart emails have one of the highest engagement and conversation rates. It should equal approximately 1% of top-line sales. If not, ensure you have at least a three-contact email series with promotions, cross-selling, and product recommendations.
3. Is your ESP capturing all abandoned cart / browse emails? If not, utilize a 3^rd party vendor to capture more addresses. Such specialty vendors can add 30% to 40% more email addresses, likely adding another 30% to 40% more revenue.
4. Incorporate a first-time buyer nurture series. The first purchase is just the start of your customer engagement lifecycle, with the goal of getting that second purchase within 90 days. If not, that new customer is unlikely to repurchase.
5. Don’t forget about your VIP customers! Every company has its core group of returning customers, and you should do everything in your power to keep these customers happy and loyal. Pre-Black Friday promotions are a great way to acknowledge their loyalty with a specially crafted promotion just for them.
6. Confirmation emails have the largest open rates of your automated series, yet the marketing potential within these emails often remains underutilized. Take advantage of the engaged audience by including upselling and cross-selling opportunities in these emails. Based on their recent interaction, suggest related products or services that might interest the recipient.
7. Optimizing the preview text of your emails is a crucial aspect of email marketing, as it can influence whether recipients open and engage with your messages. It provides a sneak peek of what the email contains and can significantly affect whether the recipient decides to open it.
8. Ensuring that essential messages and calls-to-action (CTAs) are prominently displayed above the fold in your marketing materials, such as emails and landing pages, is critical for capturing your audience’s attention. The content allows us to present our core message or value proposition clearly and concisely. It sets the tone for the entire interaction.
9. Utilize personalization in subject lines and content to grab recipients’ attention and entice them to open our emails. They’re more likely to engage when they see content that resonates with their interests.
10. Subject line testing is a valuable practice in email marketing to optimize open rates and engagement. Through A/B testing or multivariate testing, brands can gather data on subject line performance. This data guides our decisions and helps us refine our email marketing strategy over time.
11. Creating easy-to-skim emails is crucial for ensuring recipients quickly grasp the key points and act. When recipients can swiftly identify relevant content, they are more likely to convert.
12. Including compelling calls to action (CTAs) in your emails is essential for driving desired actions from your recipients. CTAs catalyze engagement, encouraging recipients to interact with your content and explore your offerings. Effective CTAs leave no room for ambiguity. They convey precisely what we want recipients to do, ensuring our message is understood and acted upon.
13. Optimizing emails for mobile devices is crucial to ensure a seamless and user-friendly experience for smartphone recipients who access their emails. With many recipients accessing their emails on smartphones and tablets, mobile optimization is no longer an option—it’s a necessity. Mobile-optimized emails are designed to fit smaller screens, making text and images easier to read without excessive zooming or scrolling.
14. Sending “Back in Stock” emails is an effective strategy to notify customers when a product they were interested in is available again. This is especially critical during a highly promotion period when inventories sell out quickly.
15. Engaging customers when they are about to leave your website, often referred to as exit-intent pop-ups, can help retain their attention and potentially convert them into customers. Ensure the pop-up design is user-friendly, visually appealing, and easy to close for those who choose to exit.