5 steps to creating a successful holiday email campaign, starting on Black Friday

A great holiday email campaign will help increase sales in the last quarter, but you would like a strategy before sending your email. Here’s what it should include – and how to implement it without burning out.

If you are planning on sending marketing emails to your customers during the holiday season, you have got the right mindset. As Black Friday kicks off the busiest shopping season, your enterprise will profit from additional visibility in your inbox.

But how are you going to create a holiday email campaign that will probably be effective?

Follow these steps to save time, create offers that appeal to your audience, and increase your sales over the next few weeks.

#1. Define success metrics for your holiday email campaign

Before you create your holiday emails, it’s a good idea to clearly define your goals and the success of your enterprise. This will assist you avoid looking for the mistaken metrics and being dissatisfied with your campaign results.

Here is a list of questions you and your team can answer:

• What is our goal? Do we wish to increase overall brand awareness or increase sales of specific products?
• How do we plan to achieve this goal? What approaches would produce the best results based on what we know about our customers?
• How do we measure our performance? What indicators are most significant to us?

Once you agree on these facets, you’ll have greater clarity in creating your campaigns, so you’ll be able to focus on what you would like to achieve.

#2. Specify your offers

Creating an attractive offer is the basis of a Christmas e-mail campaign. You can have excellent execution, but your efforts will probably be wasted if your audience doesn’t resonate with your offering.

So how to create an offer that can attract and convert? Go back to your initial goals.

For example, if you would like to increase sales to existing customers, your offer should attract this specific group of individuals. Alternatively, if your most important goal is to acquire recent leads, you’ll be able to start by sending a series of educational emails to this segment – before you begin selling hard.

Here are some examples of offers to consider, depending on your audience and their journey with your brand:

• Early discounts
• Higher discounts before, during and after the holidays
• Free shipping
• Discount set + free shipping
• Free product samples
• Gift cards and coupons

#3. Verify your list and authenticate your emails

Creating the right offers for your prospects and customers is crucial to your engagement rates. However, to run a successful holiday email campaign, you furthermore mght need to be in good technical shape.

Earlier this 12 months, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft introduced stricter email sending policies, and ignoring them could result in your email being sent straight to your spam folder. The regulations state that senders of bulk emails must:

• Keep your bounce rate low (industry benchmark is below 2%)
• Authenticate their emails using protocols similar to DMARC, SFP, and DKIM
• Maintain a low spam criticism rate (no higher than 0.3%)

To ensure your holiday emails land in other people’s inboxes, ensure to run your database through an email verification service and remove outdated data. Also look at email authentication tools and consider implementing SPF, DKIM and DMARC protocols. These protocols act as security checks, confirming that your emails actually come from your domain. This will increase trust in ISPs and improve email deliverability.

#4. Select the appropriate email format

Once you are sure your email list is healthy and your domain security is checked, it is time to think about your email format. Depending on your organization, your emails could also be:

• HTML: wealthy in images representing your products or services
• Plain text: consisting only of text, with hyperlinks at specific anchors and calls to motion.

B2C firms tend to use sleek, eye-catching visuals in their emails – and the B2B industry has also embraced this trend. A holiday email campaign will even be the right time to fill your emails with holiday designs.

If you go the HTML email route, test them to make sure they’re encoded appropriately. Broken tags and design errors could cause your messages to find yourself in spam. Fortunately, you’ll find reliable email deliverability testing tools and get the most out of them before launching your campaign.

#5. Choose the best sending cadence

Your holiday email campaign plan is almost ready! One more step: How many emails must you send – and how often? The right posting frequency means the most engagement.

Here are some facets to keep in mind:

• Inboxes are full. On average 35% of all emails remain unread, so when planning your holiday emails, remember about your customers’ time and attention. Over the next few weeks, consumers’ inboxes will probably be flooded with marketing messages.
• Contacting your email list early will provide you with an advantage. Consider launching your campaign at least a week before Black Friday to warm up your audience and avoid getting caught up in the rush of sales offers.
• Avoid sending emails on low-engagement days, similar to Fridays and weekends. Instead, analyze your latest metrics and concentrate to the days and times when subscribers are almost certainly to engage with your emails.

Final tip: be prepared for real-time adjustments

Having a smart strategy will assist you get the most out of your holiday email campaign. But today we get real-time viewer feedback on just about all channels. So if your approach doesn’t suit you, you furthermore mght need to have the ability to adapt in real time.

Monitoring your results is easy: check your reports for every email you send. Open rates don’t tell the whole story, so look at your click-through rate. Are your customers engaging with your content? Staying flexible and updating your campaigns to double the variety of effective elements will make a difference.

Talk to your team ahead of time so everyone from designers to copywriters could be ready to improve and improve your emails. The more you focus on what your customers want, the higher results you’ll see from your holiday email campaign.