7 Tips for Sending Holiday Emails that Deliver | Acoustic Digital Experience Blog

• Updated on: 2024-01-29
• Read original article here

Ready or not the holiday shopping season is upon us. “FTI Consulting's Retail & Consumer Products practice forecasts that online retail sales will reach $1.07 trillion in 2022, up 11.7% from last year.” And, email marketing is one of the best and most effective ways to reach customers during this time of year. So, it’s time to make a list of strategic priorities for your 2022 campaigns and check it twice to maximize your email marketing success.  

While inbox providers do make allowances for the increase in volume during the holidays, marketers will find the most success by following best practices for sending. It’s especially important during the holiday season to keep email brief, make it valuable (worth a reader’s time/attention), and target it to the right audience. And, we can’t stress enough how critical it is to maintain a good sender reputation (more on this below) for email to have the best chance at arriving in a recipient’s inbox. 

Late September/early October is the best time to clean up mailing lists. Check your lists for recipients that didn’t opt in, misspelled addresses, old/inactive addresses, and spam trap addresses. Removing as many of those bad addresses as possible not only assists with maintaining healthy IP and Domain reputation but also mitigates the risk of messages being blocked or going to spam when increasing email volume during the holidays.  

Providing value has a two-fold benefit. First, it increases the chance of converting potential customers. That value can also trigger more engagement with the emails being sent. These types of engagements (opens, clicks) assist with IP and Domain reputation, increasing the ability to consistently get mail delivered. Conversely, if value is not provided, and volume is increased, email will be more prone to non-engagement and/or spam complaints. Both of which make it harder to get into the recipient’s inbox if sending reputation drops. 

By using inbox and/or seed list testing, there will be more visibility into an email’s performance before a production send. This gives time to cleanup an email if there is any issue with the content that may be causing the message to be blocked or go to spam.  

Pro tip: Sending email to a personal free email address (think Yahoo, Gmail) is a great way to test an email. You will get to see exactly where the inbox provider is placing the mail. Be careful about moving the message to a different folder as that can change where email lands for future testing to that inbox. 

Your most engaged recipients are most likely to be your biggest ROI for your email marketing communications. Targeting these individuals should be a high priority for sending. A common mistake is introducing stagnant/old email addresses into these holiday sends. This only increases the risk of not being able to deliver if the old addresses result in complaints and/or non-engagement. If the ability to deliver to the inbox is compromised, then it will lower the chance of getting email to the most engaged recipients. 

Having a good reputation makes a difference when inbox providers determine what folder email will be placed. For more about IP and domain reputation management and how to monitor these, check out https://help.goacoustic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043024853-IP-address-and-domain-reputation 

Ensuring your messages look sleek and visually appealing across all devices is even more important during holiday sending. Consumers are overloaded with email that is vying for their attention. Making sure messages are brief, appealing, and generally easy to navigate will help with grabbing and keeping your audience’s attention.  

Black Friday is typically when the email floodgates open. We strongly recommend sending messages one to two weeks ahead. This can help you capture attention before recipients are bombarded with messages. Getting email sent before Black Friday can also mean more speedy delivery times because the inbox provider is not as bogged down with incoming email.  

At Acoustic, we know how important the holiday shopping season is for increasing revenue and customer loyalty. We are ready to help make sure your holiday communications are sent and delivered successfully.