6 Last-Minute Tips for Your Holiday Email Program

The reason to segment by activity level is twofold:

1. You want to enhance your deliverability reputation to the highest level you can. This will help you get more email into inboxes during the heart of the holiday season, which means more people will see your messages and more desired actions will occur. Do this by mailing less — don't necessarily eliminate — to your disengaged and unengaged groups.
2. There's nothing new about deliverability being critical to an email program, but many programs don't have key lists readily available to make changes to sequencing or throttling when campaigns are ready to deploy. For example, if you run into deliverability issues, you'll need to throttle your best responders by domain and you won't want to wait for that segmentation to be done. Have it ready. If you have a large number of unengaged subscribers, you should consider running it through a cleansing service to eliminate unmailable addresses. And of course, be careful mailing less engaged groups. There's value in those addresses because they'll drive some incremental revenue, but they shouldn't be treated with the same cadence as your hot and warm groups. By segmenting, you'll be able to quantify the impact of those groups on both revenue and deliverability.

You can also create a subsegment of past holiday online buyers that are unengaged or disengaged. These are the people that are generally unresponsive but purchased last year. They may be seasonal customers and should be considered a better group than that of completely unengaged. It's important to stress that someone who purchased offline isn't the same. While it's very true that promotion in one channel can drive action in another, deliverability needs to be considered here.