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Online shopping during the holidays breaks new records every year. That’s why you want to keep optimizing your holiday email marketing strategy. Of all the methods out there to corral online shoppers, email marketing is always reliable and effective.

In 2021, holiday shoppers broke records on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Retailers expect even higher consumer demand during the holidays in 2022. Not to mention Christmas and New Year’s are great sales periods.

Our 2021 survey of B2C email marketers found that 77% agree that their Black Friday emails produce a significant return on investment (ROI). The report surveyed businesses of all sizes from six B2C verticals.

With so much revenue in play and holiday email campaigns being such an effective driver of customers, it’s critical to optimize your holiday email strategy for all subscribers this season.

The only challenge here is that most businesses are adopting this strategy, and email inboxes overflow during the holidays, so how do you stand out?

Explore 14 ways to improve your holiday email campaigns and overall strategy to increase engagement, conversions, and the bottom line before the year ends.

Let’s dive in with some help from everyone’s favorite, hapless holiday hero, Clark Griswold.

1. Have a holiday-themed welcome series

Surprise new customers and subscribers this season with welcoming holiday emails.

When optimizing your email strategy for the holidays, your welcome series is one of your best ways to engage new customers and prospects and sustain that connection into the following year. 54% of email marketers identified it as the most engaging type of automation.

Since a welcome series sees four times the open rate and five times the click-through rate of any other marketing email, ensure you spruce yours up for the holidays.

If you can start teasing your holiday promotions early, do so to help motivate subscriptions. Include it in your call-to-action (CTA) on the subscriber sign-up form, add it as a banner on your website, or even use your social media presence to gain subscribers.

With welcome emails playing such a hefty role in brands’ email ROI, ensure yours is fully up to snuff for the new subscriber opportunities just around the corner. This can mean things like including a free gift and injecting personality. 

2. Take advantage of email list segmentation.

Are your subscribers lumped together in one tangled list?

You’ve probably heard the marketing saying, “It’s all about reaching the right person with the right message at the right time and with the right media.” That sounds great, but how do you do it? Since email marketers aren’t in the business of mind reading (usually), email list segmentation can work wonders, especially during the holidays.

With the proper analytics and reporting in place, you can segment your list by simple things like age and gender, down to more granular characteristics like geolocation and the devices your subscribers use to read email. You can also segment by browsing behavior, shopping behavior, cart profile, and average order size. Remember that people buy many gifts during the holidays, which means they’ll be shopping for others.

Segmenting your list by geolocation can be seriously powerful. Gathering this piece of information is as easy as adding a ZIP code to your purchase or opt-in form.

For the holidays, you can also create segments that’ll be uniquely effective with holiday email campaigns. For instance, you can target people who like to shop early, wait until the last minute, download specific gift guides, and are on the edge of a shipping cutoff date based on their location. Get specifics on how to implement these hyper-segmentation strategies.

3. Set up a preference center

If you don’t have the right data to segment your list, introducing a preference center gives subscribers the chance to segment themselves for you. It also gives them the chance to unsubscribe. But that’s inevitable, especially during the holidays, as brands worldwide ramp up their email-sending frequency. 

While you can’t retain every subscriber thinking about leaving your list, you can greatly reduce the number of unsubscribes by integrating an email preference center into your process. An email preference center is a landing page the subscriber arrives at after they hit the unsubscribe button. The page allows them to take various actions: update their email address, change the frequency of the mailings, and even opt out for good.

Do you have multiple email lists? Tons of different products? During the holiday season, when you’re hitting the email sends hard, let your subscribers tell you when and what they want to hear about through your preference center.

By leveraging this strategy, you can deliver hyper-customized campaigns and mitigate unsubscribes. You might even boost your open and click rates in the process. Win-win!

4. Use your data wisely

As part of your email marketing program, you’ve probably collected some data about your subscribers. Remember to stay on the right side of data protection laws like the GDPR, but don’t forget to use the data you’ve to create tailored holiday email marketing campaigns that your customers want to read. Even better, you can use these data points to create dynamic content.

Track your analytics and marketing metrics to see which campaigns performed better and why. Then, you can adapt your emails to work better for future holidays. 

5. Re-engage inactive subscribers

The holidays are a good time to get disengaged customers and dormant subscribers interested in your brand again.

Create a re-engagement campaign for the holidays to see if some of those people are still active and in need of your products and services. Provide a special and exclusive set of offers for them, and use subject lines that speak to their inactivity so they’ll open it and see your offer. If you can add personalization, that’s even better. 

It’s about quality, not just quantity when it comes to your email list. Inbox service providers (ISPs) use engagement metrics as part of their process for identifying spammers. That’s why you should proactively purge inactive users (people who haven’t opened or clicked in at least five months) from your list. This will improve your click rates and deliverability.

6. Have a cart abandonment strategy in place

The average shopping cart abandonment rate is over 70%. That means you better have a cart abandonment email trigger and a lucrative incentive to draw shoppers back in.

Our survey report reveals that in 2020, abandoned cart emails earned a 38.5% open rate and a 20% conversion rate. We also found that only 18% of companies are using abandoned cart email automation – that’s a lot of money that companies are just letting slip away. 26% of the most successful marketers are using this strategy. If you don’t have holiday abandoned cart emails in place, this may be your top priority.

7. Design a holiday email template

Getting noticed is partly about repetition. If every holiday email you send looks too different, your subscribers may not realize they’re all from your company. A consistent, attention-getting, branded holiday email template solves this problem.

But creating your own email templates entails a fair amount of work. There’s nothing wrong with using existing HTML email templates and adjusting them to fit your brand, as needed. Here are a few advanced holiday email template tips that touch on styling, personalization, and deliverability.  Or, check out some newly designed holiday email marketing templates from our friends at Mailjet. All of them are responsive email designs, which is important because lots of holiday shopping happens on mobile devices. More importantly, they’re designed with accessibility in mind.

8. Break down automated transactional and shipping emails

Transactional emails, not always as exciting as marketing emails, are still an extremely important component of your holiday email marketing strategy. They can get 4x–8x more opens and clicks than bulk marketing emails. They can even make your first impression on new buyers this holiday season, so you need to make them count.

For starters, you need to make sure they show up on time. 41% of consumers wait no more than a minute for a transactional email to show up before losing patience. This is customer service, and you need to win at it with every transactional email. Real-time monitoring can help you stay on top of your holiday transactional email deliverability. 

Check out a few ways to optimize your shipment confirmation emails by using dynamic content to improve the subscriber experience. 

9. Don’t forget personalization

According to MarTech.org, personalized emails see up to a 600% lift in transaction rates and revenue compared to non-personalized emails. Using merge tags, you can start by addressing the subscriber by their first name. But that’s just the beginning. 

If you really want to take the email’s relevance to the next level, use dynamic content to personalize based on things like subscriber location, weather, expiring promotions, and low inventory on favorite products. 

One of the most effective forms of personalization is product recommendations. Tell people about products they’re more likely to buy based on past purchases. This will lead to more purchases and a longer consumer lifetime value (LTV).

Our survey found that 45% of the most successful email marketers used personalized product recommendations and dynamic content in their email campaigns. That means 61% aren’t using these powerful segmentation strategies. Are you?

10. Promote your sales ahead of time

Don’t let the holiday seasons catch you unawares. Instead, start planning earlier to develop an email marketing strategy that works best for you and your customers.

We talked about marketing psychology elsewhere, and a useful tactic is the more-exposure effect. Expose your subscribers early and often to your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, New Year, and other holiday sales. This way, when you’re ready to roll out the sale, they’re ready to follow your CTA to your landing page.

11. Add a touch of connection with interactive holiday emails

Our survey also found that 34% of B2C email marketers across verticals used interactive email design in holiday emails.

Interactivity may mean allowing a shopper to preview different colors or styles of a product from within their email. But it can also mean using animations and videos, although that’s not the textbook definition of “interactive.”

The more you get subscribers to engage with your email, the more you convert. This truth goes back to direct mail pieces that made you cut things out, paste them on order forms, and do all sorts of silly and technically unnecessary steps. Why? That’s because interacting with it makes you more invested in the outcome.

12. Follow these holiday email deliverability tips

Avoid deliverability disasters this holiday season. Emails that get blocked or land in spam won’t do you any good at all.

Suddenly surging your email volume from a trickle to a deluge can trigger problems with spam filters. There’s a bit of an art to increasing your email frequency while remaining in their good graces and not sacrificing holiday email deliverability. Here are some common mistakes to avoid and helpful tips to keep your holiday email deliverability rates sparkling:

• Don’t increase your sending volume overnight: Warm up your IP address to slowly prepare it to send your email campaigns. This way, ISPs will be less likely to flag your ecommerce marketing campaigns as spam.
• Check your email list: While it’s always good to maintain your mailing list hygiene, ensure to remove disengaged users from your list before you hit send. That’ll reduce your spam or abuse complaint count and help you stay off blocklists.
• Have a clear way to opt out: It’s sad to see your subscribers go, but it’s worse if they want to leave and you’re sending them email after holiday email. Have a clear way to unsubscribe so your readers don’t mark your emails as spam.

Looking for tools to help you improve email deliverability? Check out InboxReady – a complete suite of solutions for email verifications, blocklist monitoring, and inbox placement support.

13. Use holiday email marketing for good

With great power comes great responsibility. This year, consider adding some cause marketing to your holiday email marketing campaigns. Consumers are drawn to businesses that actively seek to positively impact the world.

By dedicating a portion of proceeds from a sale to a specific charity, you’re giving customers not only another reason to shop from you but also to spend more. After all, the more they spend, the more they help someone else. Employees also appreciate working for a company that gives something back to people and places in need – mentioning this in marketing helps remind them of the company’s efforts.

Also, you don’t have to make this all about sales. Once Macy’s sent an email asking people to write a letter to Santa and bring it to a store, leading to up to $1 million in donations to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. 

14. Test holiday emails to stay off the naughty list

Now that you have this guide to preparing your holiday email campaigns, you’re ready to send, right? Well, not quite. Even if you perfectly segment your emails and your holiday offers to resonate with your customers, none of it matters if your email shows up looking like a tangled mess of holiday lights in the inbox.

Your readers won’t trust your product or brand if your emails don’t render properly, aren’t accessible, or have tons of silly mistakes. 

That’s why you need to test every email you send this season across dozens of email clients and devices, so you can know you’re sending a polished email to everyone.