Is Your Email Database Ready for Holiday Marketing?

The holiday season is upon us, and for many it’s the most hectic time of year. It’s easy to get swept up in the busy-ness, but your customers are expecting to hear from you! To keep connecting with customers and creating micro-moments throughout the holiday season, your email database needs to be sparkling clean with validated email addresses and enhanced records that include behavioral, demographic, and activity data. How do you find the right services to optimize your database for better holiday engagement with the budget you have left for the year?

Services that optimize your database for holiday email campaigns

Email Validation

The last thing you need during the holiday season are deliverability issues. In fact, 8.4% of email addresses in an average database are invalid, misspelled, or fake. Customers switch emails throughout the year or have specific shopping email addresses, and this makes it difficult to determine if an email address is valid or not. By investing in an Email Validation service, you can:

• Improve deliverability
• Reduce spam complaints and bounce rates
• Ensure you’re sending to real people at real email addresses

A great holiday email campaign begins and ends with a database of valid email addresses. After all, you’re sending an offer, announcement, or any other holiday email for a reason.

Email Intelligence

Once your database is filled with valid emails, it’s time to segment and personalize! However, it’s difficult to personalize your message when customer records don’t include impactful data like income level, marriage status, and lifestyle information. This is especially true of newly acquired emails that lack the deeper data insights you have for your most loyal customers. Since you’ll see a major influx of new emails during the holiday season, how can you send loyalty-level messages to your newest subscribers?

Email Intelligence services help e-commerce and retail marketers better understand the individuals you’re trying to reach to better personalize their offers. Some data categories available through Email Intelligence services include:

• Demographic – gender, zip
• Household – marital status, income
• Purchase Intent – kids and babies, electronics
• Life Stage – millennial, expecting, mom
• Lifecycle – gamer, beauty seeker, DIY-er
• Buyer Intent – online buyer, holiday shopper

Your personalization and segmentation capabilities help ensure your holiday campaigns are as impactful as possible, even for your newest email contacts and your abandon cart strategies. That’s right, even your follow-up campaigns have the power to generate more revenue and increase user engagement. In fact, one of our clients saw a 2,230% ROI for an abandoned cart email campaign that used data enhanced with Email Intelligence, attributing 51% of overall site revenue to this campaign afterwards. So it’s easy to see how Email Intelligence data enhancement will bring immediate dollars to your bottom line.

Email Activity Data

There’s always a risk your email might hit a spam filter or get sent to a valid email that hasn’t been used in a while. To mitigate this and ensure your email offer is headed to an active inbox where it’ll be seen before St. Patrick’s Day, activity data such as Month Last Open is here to save the day. What’s Month Last Open and how do you use this opener data, though?

Think of it this way: You’ve built great email campaigns, but your list is looking a little light. You need to bulk up the list with active customers who would love to receive you offer. Month Last Open data helps you find even more customers to include in the campaigns by identifying active emails within your inactive email data file. All you have to do is determine the timespan from which you’d like to check inbox activity. And from here, your awesome re-engagement campaign can uncover those buyers who were silent during the year but more active during the holiday season.

Another way to use Email Activity Metrics is as a form of fraud prevention. Use it in combination with your first-party data to double check that emails are legitimate and active. This ensures your numbers at the beginning of the next year are accurate and can even help you plan appropriately for next year’s holiday email campaigns.

Identity Matching

While email marketing during the holiday season is obviously the most efficient way to distribute offers and announcements, direct mail campaigns can be pretty impactful, too. For example, if your customers aren’t engaging in the email channel, it might be time to reach out to them with a personalized direct mail campaign offer. Identity Matching services use the email address in your database to append a name and postal to the contact record. Using the insight from past purchases or browsing behavior, you can send a completely personalized direct mail piece.

Cross-channel marketing around the holidays means plenty of personalized micro-moments with email coupons and direct mail offers. You can also use the contact record data to see when the customer was active last year around the holidays and anticipate what they might want to purchase this year! Then you can send the most relevant offers through email and direct mail. It all comes down to cross-channel re-engagement, and with the Identity Matching services, it’s like giving a gift to yourself this year.

It takes time to prime your database properly. From Black Friday and Cyber Monday to Hanukkah, Christmas, and more. The key is getting a head start on optimizing your database with valid emails and enhanced contact records that allow you to send your most effective holiday marketing campaigns yet. All it takes is a call!