Send Better Holiday Email Campaigns in Just 3 Steps

Q4 holiday email campaigns are just around the corner, and every marketer’s goal is to improve on last year’s results. But have you taken the necessary steps to ensure your campaigns are optimized for deliverability, personalization, and overall brand engagement? We’ve got 3 easy steps you can take now to send better holiday email campaigns later.

Step 1: Clean Your Email Database

The last thing you want around the holiday season is subpar deliverability caused by mailing to invalid or undeliverable emails. In fact, on average, 8.4% of email addresses in a customer database are invalid, misspelled or fake!

If you have CRM contacts you’re not regularly engaging with or you haven’t emailed since last year’s holiday season, you’ll want to make sure the email address is still good. Validating the emails improves deliverability and reduces spam complaints and bounce rates — all of which help with inbox placement.

Step 2: Enhance Personalization and Improve Segmentation

Now that your emails are clean and deliverable, it’s important to understand who that person is behind the email address. Let’s use an example: Two women are buying a gift from a children’s store.

The first instinct for a brand may be to assume the buyer is a parent purchasing for their child. In reality, there are plenty of different reasons a person may be purchasing a children’s toy:

• an aunt or uncle buying for their niece or nephew
• a grandparent purchasing for their grandchild
• a person without children purchasing for a friend’s child

With this in mind, you can see why having key data points that enhance personalization and improve segmentation go hand in hand. Rather than receiving a blanketed message that doesn’t feel relevant at all, receiving a content piece that speaks to you as an individual makes a major difference in whether or not you’ll continue to engage with that brand.

Step 3: Identify Active vs. Inactive Contacts

Another way to improve your holiday email campaign performance is by improving your sending strategies and sending the right content to active vs. previously unengaged contacts. There are two ways to make better sending decisions regarding active and inactive contacts:

1. Identify inactives and send a re-engagement campaign before the holidays
2. Add more people to your list to gain more value in the holiday season

Another way to improve your holiday email campaign performance when it comes to active vs. inactive identification is by using technology to identify your anonymous website visitors and re-engage them with another relevant offer based on their site engagement. Typically, this technology can identify between 10-20% of your anonymous traffic, which is 10-20% more of an audience to engage!

Want to learn more about these steps and improving your holiday email performance this year? Check out our fireside chat with ActiveProspect for more in-depth discussion on these steps and our interactive Q&A!