Email Marketing at Christmas can be an exciting but challenging time for marketers. There’s huge opportunity to explore untapped markets and enjoy massive growth, but this can be hampered by fierce competition, tight deadlines, and poor planning.
An assessment of last year’s industry trends and an acute awareness of how your users are interacting with your content should be high on your list. But there’s plenty more you can do to make your Christmas email marketing campaigns a roaring success.
Use these 10 tips to boost your Christmas email marketing campaigns and uncover any potential weaknesses in your strategy, so you can truly make the most of this holiday season.
Plan Ahead
While there’s no golden rule with respect to exactly when to start planning your Christmas email marketing campaigns, earlier is usually better. Have your offers planned out. Your template designs ready to go. Your sales copy ready to test. Your autoresponders — including abandon card messages — all prepared in advance.
If you’re planning to increase your send volume over the holiday period, be careful. Increased sending rates over a short time period risks triggering spam filters, and damaging your sender reputation. This can impact email deliverability. To avoid this avoid sudden changes in sending practices. By planning ahead, you can calculate precisely how to ramp up your sending rates, as well as your inbox placement and read rates, to avoid any nasty surprises.
Spruce Up your Subscriber List
While it may be tempting to send your Christmas email campaigns to everyone on your list, casting such a wide net can have unintended consequences. Inactive subscribers, low engagement rates, and spam traps can severely hamper your sender reputation.
To combat this risk, remove inactive subscribers from your list. You could even use reputable email validation service to clean your list further.
As always, resist the urge to purchase subscriber files that may contain hidden nasties that’ll get in into a world of trouble. A smaller clean list is always preferable to a larger dirty list.
Reconnect With Disengaged Subscribers
A clean list may be a fresh start, but you don’t want to completely lose the chance to reconnect with your inactive subscribers. So before you get too heavy handed with your list pruning, consider first creating a win-back (or re-engagement) campaign to remind disengaged users the value of your brand.
These types of emails typically have higher engagement rates than you might expect, and could put you in good stead to increase your ROI for the holiday season.
As a couple of examples, you could send out your most popular content to these subscribers to try and pique their interest. Maybe send a unique, time limited discount code, or an exclusive offer just for them.
Keep an Eye on Your Stats
Before you click the send button you’ll first want to know that your emails are landing in the subscriber inbox. This is particularly true in busy times of the year when an increase in email volumes can put a strain on deliverability rates.
If you’re sending more promotional campaigns than usual, this is particularly important as overly promotional messaging can land you in the Promotions folder, or even the spam folder.
It’s important to monitor your performance by keeping an eye on your stats so you can be sure that all your hard work is paying off. There are free email marketing tools that can help with this.
Sender reputation, subscriber engagement, and inbox placement are all important metrics you must take into account to guarantee success. Otherwise, a problem could go unnoticed, thereby lowering the ROI of your Christmas email marketing campaigns.
Use Calendar Triggered Events
Schedule some carefully crafted emails both in the run-up to Christmas, and post-Christmas to make your overall campaign as successful as possible.
As a few ideas: send out a campaign a few weeks before Christmas letting subscribers know about your most popular products. Send another listing your best Christmas deals. And another reminding people that “today is the last chance to order to guarantee delivery before Christmas!”.
After Christmas, send an automated message letting people know about your best post-Christmas offers, etc. Be as creative as you can with these messages.
Listen to Your Users
As personalization continues to be an essential factor in driving user and subscriber engagement, it’s vital to listen to both your website visitors and newsletter subscribers to make sure you’re sending content that resonates. Ask yourself what improvements can be made to your content to better align with what users want.
Try to focus on performance-based user feedback rather than making generalizations about your list. Look at metrics such as which email clients subscribers are using, which devices they are viewing emails on, and what times of day have the highest engagement rates. Keep an eye on the kind of links your subscribers click, their average purchase price, which products are bought alongside each other, and any other information you have access to.
Use this data to create better and more personal content which will have a positive effect on your conversion rate.
Test, Test, Test
It’s not always possible to know how your users will react to your content ahead of time. Instead of taking a gamble on your whole list, why not try segmenting your list to test key elements of your campaign?
Subject lines, template design, and calls-to-action are all things that can easily be tested to improve open rates, read rates, and clicks, and provide a better experience for users.
Go Big or Go Home
Competition can be fierce — especially at high volume times of the year like Christmas — and you typically only have a few seconds to capture the reader’s attention. This, mixed with the fact that many businesses rely on Christmas for most of their yearly sales, means you need to think big.
Powerful subject lines, personalization, and emojis are all things you can use to stand out from the crowd. Pull up the results from your A/B split tests and review your user engagement stats to find out which elements are most likely achieve the highest ROI. Design fresh email templates specifically for your Christmas campaigns. Include a countdown GIF to create a sense of urgency. Send automated follow-up emails to remind people about offers they showed interest in.
We’d also recommend going one step further, segmenting your list based on user data to create targeted campaigns for each group.
Monitor Your Sender Reputation
We’ve mentioned this in passing, but it’s worth reiterating. Plummeting email deliverability rates over Christmas is a nightmare scenario that could cost you dearly. Thankfully, there are many ways to monitor your sender reputation to make sure you don’t fall foul of the dreaded email blacklist.
Google Postmaster Tools is an excellent, free way to access data and diagnostics that impact your sender reputation in Gmail. Used in conjunction with reputable domain blacklist and email spam check tools it can provide delivery error reports, spam reports, and feedback loops to help you stay on the right track. We’ve written a full overview of Google Postmaster Tools, and also listed free tools that can help you keep an eye on your sender reputation.
Keep to Email Best Practices
Sometimes it’s not enough simply to stay off the blacklists. You’ll also want to prove yourself as a safe, responsible sender by maintaining best practices and being an all round responsible email marketer. Safe senders enjoy a higher percentage of emails delivered to the inbox and less risk of being placed in the spam folder.
If you really want to stand out as a top sender you can register for Return Path Certification from Validity. This program can give you insight into your inbox placement with the top email providers, and comes with some extra benefits such as higher email deliverability, and reaching more subscribers.
Take Your Christmas Email Marketing Up a Notch
Use these tips to smash your previous Christmas email marketing records. Be creative. Plan in advance. Be mindful of best practices. Always consider what subscribers will find valuable. And leverage the scheduling and automation features included in your email marketing platform to really boost your ROI.
