How email marketing can help you make most of your post-holiday season
In the last months of the year, we tend to burn the candle at both ends. We juggle holiday shopping, family in town, year-end income goals, and email bells that need to work. It's a lot of pressure for a few months. This article describes what you need to do before, during, and after the holidays so that you can have a successful vacation email program that will take you into the New Year.
Before starting your Christmas email campaigns, prepare your email program for a continuous mailing flow. This means cleaning up your list, updating your templates, and segmenting your lists in plenty of time to test them. problems before the big problem holidays.One sure way to avoid delivery of your emails is to send them to an unattended list. Sending to old email addresses or to addresses that have not interacted with your email recently increases the chances of getting spam traps and increasing your spam report rate.Inbox providers deal with these negative signals and may decide to filter your emails further or completely block your emails.These are all very expensive problems to solve during this important shipping season.
Make sure the recipients you send are the ones who open and click on your messages. Never send mails to an email address that has not been opened or clicked on from you in the last 6 months. Very often it is best to only ship to addresses that have been positively engaged in the last 3 months.If you need to send to less compromised emails, do so with a reduced frequency and consider segmenting them by sending to a different IP group and subdomain / domain combination than your compromised recipients.
Preference Center updates
It's never worth exhausting your customers with too much vacation email, but it's a sure way to increase your sending volume. Include an additional checkbox on your unsubscribe or mail preference center page that allows users to completely disable their vacation mail. When email users choose this option, you add them to your suppression list (a list of contacts you don't send) until January. Then once the Christmas dust has settled, you can add them back to your regular mailing list.In addition to a downlink subscription, you can match the traditional subscription options to reduce the frequency of communications. Your preference center is beneficial to everyone because it puts the frequency of communication in the hands of your sweats while you can still send them emails.
Personalize
Getting recipients to open your message is only half the battle for retailers. The other half is convincing recipients to act.One of the most effective methods of attracting recipients is personalization. Customize your post content to refer to a customer's location, what they purchased previously, or their current plan type. To create personalized emails, you need to segment your list based on your available data. This requires some fieldwork prior to your vacation shipment, so start early to discover what makes your segmented lists unique.
VIP
Although all of them, if sweats are important, there is probably one part of your list that is more interested in your emails than others. Consider segment these VIP sweats who, for example, have opened more than 10 messages in the last 30 days (or a percentage higher than the average of all their sent emails).Then you can send vacation emails to your most engaged users a few hours before sending them to the rest of your list.
5 Ways To Set Up Your Email Program For A Successful Holiday Season
Holidays have arrived!
At this point (from mid-November) your list should be blank, your models are ready to go, it will launch, and your segments will be well defined. But you know as well as I do that there is still work to be done, You may not have to make any significant changes, but you can certainly try small adjustments to your hoods. You should also keep an eye on your statistics and the frequency with which you send.
Test: subject lines, CTA and delivery times
Sending virtually the same email with a single modified variable, allows you to directly attribute the greatest success (or failure) of them all to that specific variable change.You can test your shipping address, the subject line of your email or the previous header, to name a few. When conducting a test, it is preferable to choose only one of these variables to test at a time.
An important element to test regularly is the shipping time. Start with bigger windows like tomorrow vs. late or late vs. night. Then reduce the amount of time until you find the sweet spot.We also found it useful to send in an "off" time. Most email marketers will choose to send their emails on time, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or 30 minutes past the hour, so they send at 10:37 a.m., for example, should help you avoid overwhelmed servers and possible email delays.
The testing possibilities are endless, so don't be overwhelmed. Remember that while it will take longer to test each variable one by one, it is worth it in the long run. Your followers are important, and learning what they respond best to is just one way to show them that you care.
Frequency
E-mail is a communication tool that senders often abuse during the holidays. What used to be a weekly newsletter can turn into several daily emails. Yes, recipients will likely expect a slightly higher volume of emails in their inbox, because the holidays are exciting and worthy of most communications. Make sure your posts are useful, timely, and meet your expectations.
You survived the holidays
Phew! You spent the holidays in one piece. The hard part is over and it is time for you to step into the new year full of ambition and new motivation. Just a few things to keep in mind as we begin the New Year and continue to monitor your email program.
Churn after the holidays
Many people can sign up for your emails during the holiday season because they are shopping for their family or for a couple, not because they are personally interested in your vacation deals.This can lead to an increase in unsubscribe rate and spam complaints after the holiday season.To help you identify people who might unsubscribe in advance, consider segmenting your list by start date and / or source.You can then monitor the open and click rates for these holiday entries to Identify drops in engagement after the holidays.Then if you start to see that your engagement stats drop after the holidays or if you spam them the complaints go up, think about:
Reducing your frequency - Send a series of targeted campaigns that sell their value and reset why they want to keep getting your mail. Send a targeted campaign asking them to act, as a link to continue receiving their emails; This can help weed out those who are not interested in your emails, but don't want to take action to unsubscribe from your list. Establish a termination policy for email addresses that remove them after 30-60 days without engagement
Let's face it, the holidays are crazy. Follow the guidelines above to help you manage your Christmas email adventures.
Before the holidays: Clean up your list before you send for the holidays to protect your shipping reputation and make sure your emails get sent to your inbox.
During the holidays: Make no mistake sending your emails. You can send more emails while on vacation, but keep an eye on your engagement statistics to see how your recipients are coping with the increased frequency.
After the holidays: Check who has signed up to receive your emails during the holiday season.