Insights
Strategy
Insights
Strategy
‘Tis the season to send out Christmas campaigns again. In the jolliest season of them all, the average American household spends 1500$ on Christmas shopping. That’s quite some money spent on outfits, food, decoration, entertainment, and of course gifts. And what better way to get those items under someone’s attention than via an incredible Christmas campaign, right?
Published in:
Dec 2021
To get those seasonal fashionistas and last-minute gift shoppers’ attention, you want to send out your best email campaign ever. On the other side, you want to make sure that all the emails actually hit someone's inbox, too. To help you out with that and everything in between, I’ve asked my email friends for their thoughts on how to best prepare your Christmas email campaign.
A recent article from Fortunly featured some really interesting statistics about Christmas shopping in the US of A. Though a lot of Christmas shopping still happens in brick-and-mortar stores (Duncan's Toy Chest-style, I assume), 60% of US consumers prefer shopping online. 61% of US consumers would reveal personal information to get special deals. This opens up a massive opportunity to collect valuable email data and send highly relevant Christmas campaigns.
Oh, and if you were wondering if -now- it isn't too late for a Christmas email campaign: 60%+ of Americans buy their gifts a week before Christmas.
Deliverability monitoring is crucial to any email marketing strategy. How much value does your most amazing email have if you can’t ensure your audience will actually receive it… in the inbox?
If you have never seen what this data looks like, it is time to start today! Ask a deliverability specialist you know to show you the type of data they have access to! Not only is having access to these tools and monitoring your reputation very important for any business that relies on sending emails to communicate with audience members, but I promise you will get more excited to see all this secret mystical data than opening your Christmas gifts.
When you see all the data you are missing out on, you will wonder why more people aren't talking about this. Deliverability monitoring tools allow you to see data coming directly from ISPs (Inbox Service Providers) about your domain and IP reputation. You can also see your inboxing rates or if any of your domains and IPs are on any blocklists, how long and why! Who doesn’t want to know Google or Hotmail are starting to get annoyed at you before they begin outright blocking you?
There are so many differences between good delivery and great deliverability. The crucial part about deliverability monitoring is that it allows you to remain proactive instead of waiting for sales numbers to decline to realize that your recipients aren’t receiving your emails anymore. When you stay proactive in maintaining a good sender reputation, ISPs reward you as they see your business and brand as a good sender that listens to what the customers are saying.
Wouldn’t want to end up on Gmail’s or Spamhaus’ naughty list now, do we?
Yanna-Torry helps drive EmailConsul forward in a market in desperate need of accessible and reliable deliverability tools, while also representing the company in places email & deliverability have never been before.
List hygiene is just one facet of email deliverability. It is extremely important to obtain and keep good deliverability and sender domain reputation all year round. However, it’s even more crucial to do so before sending out your holiday campaigns.
If you haven’t cleaned your email lists with an email hygiene service before your big Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, consider using Webbula’s Email Hygiene now to ensure your emails are making it to your subscribers’ inboxes.
This is especially significant this year due to Apple’s preloading tracking pixels making email hygiene no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a necessity. Marketers who have relied heavily on the email open rate should take note because utilizing opens as an indicator of email address quality is no longer an option.
Also, consider protecting your database from bots by stopping them at the front door. Deploy a real-time verification solution, like Webbula’s Lead Validation, that coordinates with your CRM, ESP, or lead capture forms to stop bots at the point of entry.
Remember, even good subscriber data expires at some point. People change jobs, retire email addresses, etc., and it is the brand’s responsibility to keep up with list hygiene and to remove dormant or malicious email addresses from lists on a regular basis.
He's making a list, he's checking it twice
Jenna Devinney is the Content Marketing Manager at Webbula. She manages social media, creates eye-catching content, and oversees web design.
It’s almost Christmas 😁🎄! For most companies, that’s the time of the year where they send out a lot of emails. From highly advanced segmentation with predictive models to companies sending out generic bulk emails, I've seen it all. Of course, what works for you depends on a lot of factors. What you'll need, though, are email addresses!
My tip is about getting a cleaner database! With a cleaner database you’ll sent fewer emails (so fewer costs), with better results (CTO/CTR). Next to these benefits, it’s also pretty easy to build! Big chance you can fix this within half a day!
Because I don’t know what tools you are using, I’ll break it down into steps:
An extra takeaway for B2B companies: For step 7, you could also monitor your deliverability reports. People come and go at companies. This means that an email address will be forwarded or is giving an “out of office” back. This is not a real bounce, but chances are you still want to exclude them 😁.
Quint Wapenaar is a (technical) marketing automation specialist who is helping companies to get more out of their marketing automation tooling.
Who doesn't love a comprehensible to-do list when setting up a large campaign? P wrote down a quality list to increase the chances of hitting your customers' inbox:
Pierre is the CEO of MailSoar, an agency dedicated to ensuring your emails are going into the main inbox.
Santa receives gift wishes of the children and uses that information to select the gifts he's going to give on Christmas. Marketers typically have a valuable set of data but do not use this to their full extend.
If you know someone subscribes to your newsletter via a specialized category or product page instead of the homepage, why do you send them the same confirmation/welcome mailing? Your most precious gift is your content; you should personalize the content based on the knowledge you have of your recipients.
Next to content, also personalize the timings of some of your mailings to automatically match the preferences and optimize the built-up momentum to get the highest conversion in enriching profiles and persuade your recipients in the way you want them to behave!
If you start caring for your recipients from the start, they will show improved loyalty during their journey with you!
Sean Barten is the chairman of the Email Research commission of the Dutch DDMA, a self-pronounced data geek and managing the Dutch marketing automation software organization Tripolis.
Since t’is the season - don’t be scared to add that extra special touch!
It can be easy to surprise and delight in a few ways:
If possible, don't use up all your goodwill - be mindful about what promotions you are sending and when. All of these details are your way of showing your customers that you appreciate them for being loyal subscribers.
Najmah (who insists that you call her Naj) is a self-professed #emailgeek who has worked in a number of industries including beauty, e-commerce, travel and charity. She is now a B2C Content Manager running ExcelwithBusiness.com, where you can upskill by purchasingcourses that you can access anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace.
Businesses that are useful to the consumer will excel in 2022. Whilst consumers are in the lucky position of being spoilt for choice in the B2C sector, the always connected and ever busy customer can be left feeling overwhelmed when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
Whilst consumers will engage with brands that are relevant to them, in 2022 we take this up one more notch, they will do more business with brands that just make their lives easier. We humans are hardwired to choose the path of least resistance.
In 2022 I predict that marketers will think about email marketing automation not just as a means to sell products, but to help make lives easier. These automated campaigns will be hyper personalised from welcome campaigns and back in stock emails to replenishment campaigns and product usage updates. When planning for 2022, the successful marketers will have usefulness front of mind.
Award winning Komal has over 20 years experience in email and digital marketing. VP Marketing, Komal leads the Go-to-Market, Retention and Brand strategies at Pure360. A passionate email marketer, Komal is also Chair of the DMA Email Council.
Running a Christmas campaign as a SaaS company? From an end-of-year wrap, to end-of-year promotions, to getting ready for the new year with a new SaaS tool, there are plenty of ways you can spin a Holiday campaign.
Before you go scheduling emails and signing off for the season, here are some things I’d recommend thinking about to ensure your campaign is successful:
Christmas only comes once a year, and marketing is meant to be fun! Now’s a great time to shoot for the stars and explore blue-sky ideas and opportunities before the year is over.
Naomi West is the founder of emailcharacters.com and has worked in the SaaS email marketing space for over five years. She loves marketing automation for its ability to nurture, convert and retain subscribers using a 1:1 feel. You can find her on Twitter at @emailfromnaomi, or learn more about her here.
How to prevent spam sign-ups? Folderly shares best practices on protecting your domain reputation during overwhelming Christmas discounts.
It’s good when you bring value to your audience, and your email list grows. But there is a risk caused by spam sign-ups – bots providing fake email addresses to your sign-up forms and compromising your sender reputation. As a result, fake sign-up details impact your email outreach, domain reputation, and marketing efforts.
To secure your email list from spam contacts, follow these steps:
If you’re 100% sure that an email is fake, you should delete this spam email from your list immediately. But don’t be in a hurry to do this with questionable addresses. Instead, isolate fake sign-ups in a suppression list and review them against several criteria like sign-up source, specific words, subscription date, etc.
We hope these steps will help grow a perfect domain reputation and a list of subscribers free from spam sign-ups!
Vlad’s decades of entrepreneurial wisdom and business building experience have allowed him to successfully mentor a diverse group of business owners, entrepreneurs in growing their companies.
Now that the dark days are approaching, it is wise to check your emails to see if they are also displayed properly in dark mode.
Use html and css instead of images as much as possible, so that email clients that do not support @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) at least provide a readable variant of the dark mode that you had in mind.
It is wise to use your logos and icons such as PNG, perhaps even animated for the holidays, with a transparent background. This prevents the background color in the image from being out of sync with the rest of your email.
You can provide this with a thin border in the color of your initial background color, so that a dark image on a dark background still stands out.
With the @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) you can put your own spin on how your email looks in the dark mode of email clients that support this. Repeat this trick for Outlook.com by putting the styles you've already written in the @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) in a separate style block with [data-ogsc] before each css selector.
Wilbert Heinen breathes email, especially the technical aspect related to rendering. Wilbert doesn't care whether this is about responsive email, interactive email or AMP for email. This all makes him happy.
The holidays usually conjure up images of nostalgia and cheerful gatherings with family and friends. A time of togetherness. A time for reflection, hope, and what really matters.
It’s also been a couple years of reckoning—with social injustices, economic strife, and DE&I (diversity, equity, and inclusion) brought to the forefront. But this gives you a massive opportunity to truly connect with your email subscribers in an authentic way.
As you prepare your holiday campaign, don’t just think about that final push to meet revenue goals. Think about compassionate content. What can you send to hit your subscribers right in the feels or cement your brand as one that cares and, as a result, drives fanatical loyalty?
In an increasingly commoditized world, it’s your social mission and values that set you apart.
Don’t be afraid to play into them.
And how are you being considerate and inclusive?
Remember, not everyone celebrates Christmas, and even those who do may not celebrate its religious origins. When in doubt, lean into your company’s values and social mission as your North Star. Maybe some folks won’t agree with your message, but those who matter will. And they’ll be all the more grateful and loyal to your brand.
Magan Le is a data-driven, human-centered email geek with over a decade of email marketing experience. Magan believes in marketing with a heart and creating authentic connections with your audience—and is always looking for the best local ice cream (send recommendations her way!).
🎶 Just hear those mail bells jingling, Ring-ting-tingling too! 🎶
It’s almost that time of year. Everyone is reaching out to each other again. Are you about to join in at this competitive time and want to spread some holiday cheer? Make sure you start with these three simple steps to make your campaigns more effective:
Step 1: Setting a goal for your campaign
Start by clearly defining what the goal of your campaign is. What are you trying to achieve with your Christmas campaign?
Step 2: Make your campaign goal measurable
When you’ve defined what your goal is, make sure that it is measurable. The success of your campaign should go further than merely measuring opens & clicks. These metrics are more and more unreliable every year.
Instead, challenge yourself to look past these basic email metrics alone. Focus on what happened “after” a user clicked on your campaign, like tracking the number of users that:
Step 3: Measure the results & reflect
Whether your campaign met its goal or not, it can be a success either way. By analyzing & reflecting on the effectiveness of your campaign, you’re creating valuable insights that will form the basis upon which you can improve yourself.
Jacco Koppes is a Product Manager/Owner at Harlem Next. He is responsible for the email marketing team, the deliverability team and a development team focussed on the email infrastructure.
On the Twelfth Day Of Christmas... My good friends brought to me:
With all these great tips in mind, you will probably send your most incredible Christmas campaign ever, with the best delivery and success rates. And, as mentioned at the start of this article, now is probably the best time to send out your Christmas campaign!
