Elevate Your Holiday Email Marketing Efforts With These Tips and Tricks!

As much as the holiday season is a time of joy and incessant cheer, it also ends up striking a certain degree of anxiety in the hearts of email marketers. After all, competition between brands to stake a claim in their subscribers’ inboxes reaches a fever pitch during this period.

With people across the globe breaking out into jolly shopping sprees, a stellar holiday email marketing campaign can help you pocket the lion’s share of the tremendous revenue that is generated during this season.

However, curating a pitch-perfect holiday email marketing campaign is no walk in the park. While copious amounts of hard work, discipline, and creativity will, of course, be demanded from you, at the same time you’ll also be required to think holistically to place your campaigns a notch above your competitors.

Need some help getting started? You’re just in the right place. In this blog, we are going to discuss a host of best practices that are sure to infuse vitality into your holiday email marketing efforts. Curious to find out? Read on!

Take the Help of Generative AI Tools

During the holiday season, email production volume rises up significantly, and that obviously translates into long hours of email copywriting.

Throw your usual responsibilities into the mix, and catering to the holiday season workload can seem like a task and a half. Enter: Generative AI tools. Yes, ChatGPT, Bard, Copy.ai, and their ilk.

All you have to do is feed them a master copy and have them produce multiple similar variants of it in a flash.

Besides, with them in the equation, you no longer have to worry about a creative block, either! Think your starting idea is supremely vague? No problem! Enter it into the tool, nevertheless, and have at your disposal a host of first drafts.

Then, tinker with them as you wish, chisel away the unnecessary portions, and ultimately unearth the gem that had hitherto proven elusive.

Especially for small and mid-sized businesses who might not have the budget to hire additional resources for the holiday season requirements, generative AI tools can prove to be a real boon.

Should they tactfully manage to combine such tools with their existing content resources, they stand to give their more established competitors a run for their money.

A word to the wise: While using generative AI tools, be very sure to have human intervention. This is because content produced by these tools might be redundant, inaccurate, outdated, and riddled with biases and stereotypes.

More importantly, they won’t be able to replicate the spontaneity and personality that only a human mind is capable of. And with subscriber’s inboxes getting flooded during this time, the last thing you’d want for your emails is to copy that is generic and insipid.

Additionally, despite your briefs, these tools might not manage to infuse your unique brand tonality into their generated copy satisfactorily.

For all these reasons, it is imperative to have an experienced content professional, preferably someone who has been associated with your brand for a decent amount of time, to vet rigorously the content these tools produce.

Make Email List Segmentation an Absolute Must

Targeted messaging is where it’s at this holiday season. To ensure that you don’t get lost amidst the barrage of emails that are undoubtedly going to frequent your customer’s inboxes during this time of the year, you must directly address their pain points and interests.

And this is only possible if you judiciously segment your list- divide your audience into various compartments or “segments” based on various parameters such as age, gender, occupation, position in the sales funnel, and the like.

Having said that, keep in mind that customer behavior trends during this time witness a marked shift compared to other times of the year. This is because, during the holiday season, people shop primarily for others and not for themselves.

Hence, while preparing your segmentation frameworks, certain parameters such as past purchases, browsing history, and engagement level need to be assigned greater priority over others. The best part is that you don’t have to do all this manually.

Several tools out there (with Mailchimp and Braze being among the most recognizable names) can help you automate segmentation; this is something that will prove to be an absolute game-changer if you happen to have an extensive list of contacts.

Thus, this holiday season, make sure to stay on top of your segmentation game, for it holds the key to amplified interaction and engagement and ultimately, conversions.

Ensure Your Emails are Accessible

In 2023, if your email campaigns aren’t practicing accessibility, they will sadly find themselves located outside the zeitgeist.

With the call for fostering an inclusive community becoming more prominent with every passing day, your holiday email marketing campaigns must be in strict compliance with every single accessibility norm out there.

Consider taking the following tips into account:

• Pay attention to content organization. This involves breaking down clunky paragraphs into consumable nuggets of 2-3 lines each, using bullet points and numbering wherever necessary, and establishing a clear hierarchy by employing headings and subheadings. When your content organization is on point, subscribers accessing your emails through assistive technologies such as screen readers will face no difficulties whatsoever.
• Try to stick to the single-column layout while designing your email templates. This will render an improved fluidity to your email, thereby offering greater readability.
• Take the help of online color contrast tools (Coolors, Contrast Finder, etc.) to ensure an ideal contrast ratio between text and background.
• Use HTML semantic markup. This will help screen readers navigate through the email effectively.

Keep an Eye on Your Deliverability

Normally, brands tend to re-engage with their dormant subscribers prior to delivering their holiday campaigns. While this is, of course, standard practice, you need to be highly strategic about it.

You see, if you happen to reach out to all your dormant subscribers at once, you’ll ultimately end up spiking your send volumes unproportionately; this will only spell doom for your deliverability just ahead of the all-important holiday season.

So, the wise course of action is to reach out to such subscribers in phases, well in advance before your holiday campaigns are due to be delivered.

Wrapping It Up

We hope the insights shared above help you to supercharge your holiday email marketing campaigns. To get a comprehensive understanding of how one should approach their holiday email marketing preparations, we got in touch with some of the brightest minds of the email world. Their responses are all neatly put together in this infographic.