6 Last-Minute Tips for Your Holiday Email Program
The holidays will be upon us before we know it. For retailers, this is the make-or-break time of the year. The stress levels start to increase after a summer during which many brands solidified plans, made upgrades to their websites and more. So, what can you control now to make the season go more smoothly, save some time and drive more revenue? Here are six tips for your holiday email program:
1. Get rid of text versions of your email campaigns. They're not worth the time to create or review. If someone feels terribly strongly about them, just create a generic one that can be used for all emails, but even that isn't worth the effort. If you need proof, just run a report on how many clicks you get from text-only emails. Use the time saved to work on the below steps.
2. Get your segments set up by activity level. While you still have some time, and before the pressure to mail your entire list every day is fully upon you, segment your lists so you know what you have to work with. Segment your lists into groups based on email engagement (i.e., last open or click). Some call them hot, warm or cold segments, others call them engaged, disengaged or unengaged. Regardless of what you call them, the point is that you segment your list based on the last time they engaged with your email.
Segment definitions vary by brand, but here are some common definitions: A hot segment are those subscribers that engaged with your email in the last 90 days. Warm could be email engagement between 91 days and 180 days, and cold is anything 180-plus days. You'll also want to segment out new to file, which are email addresses acquired in a defined period of time (e.g., the last month). These segments can be overlaid and used in conjunction with any demographic, domain-specific or persona-based segments you may already have. There are a great deal of additional important analytics that can propel an email program forward, but without more resources to translate analytics insights into targeting and creative, that may need to be a Q1 project.
The reason to segment by activity level is twofold:
- 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.
- 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.
3. Experience what the customer experiences. Lots of times we're so busy in our day-to-day projects that we don't stop to understand the customer experience and how they interact with email. Since the holidays are a heavy activity season, it's important to understand how customers interact with email in order to identify small incremental changes that can be made in advance of the holidays. Go through the sign-up process in-store and on your website. Understand what the customer experiences.
You only have a short while until sites and technology are in lockdown and you won't be able to make changes. Buy something. Get the order confirmation email. Check the shipping notice. Do a password reset. Check the speed of a welcome email. For that matter, check the full welcome stream. Is it on brand? What's the offer? And of course, make sure you have web analytics tracking your emails. I'm always surprised how few transactional emails have tracking in them. This is legitimate email program revenue that should count. A little tip: People who reset their passwords are trying to do something — usually buy something!
4. Use website analytics data and search terms to make decisions about your email content. Promote things that people are using or buying. Using top search terms can help you improve subject lines. Look at your top-selling products and must-have items and promote those in your emails as anchor products. There will always be a conflict between internal buyers and the email team, but if your incentive is based on revenue, sell things that people are buying — not what was overbought. If you need to, create a separate email to promote overstocked items.
5. View your email list as an asset that's useful beyond email. Email addresses can be used for more than just email, as they're a form of online identity and may be used to target your customers on other sites, including Facebook and other social networks.
This means that in addition to your traditional outbound email campaigns, you can proactively drive both reach and frequency by extending the conversation via a display campaign on a site you might expect your customers to frequent. One of the easiest ways to implement this is by setting up display retargeting as part of your outbound email program.
Why do this? Well, if you mail 100 people, you might have 20 people open and only three click through. Retargeting is a way to connect with those 17 people with your messages as they browse.
Connecting your email program with your display advertising initiatives is a great way to extend reach and increase engagement. I do, however, highly recommend connecting with your legal and/or privacy team prior to launching display retargeting to ensure this tactic falls within both corporate policy as well your customer-facing privacy policy. One key element is to understand under what permission standard the email address was collected and how that aligns with using it in another channel to communicate with your customer.
6. Use holiday site traffic increases to benefit your email program. Make sure you have an email address sign-up button prominently on your site. Be ready to capitalize on increased site traffic for getting permissions for email and SMS. Most online retailers have their email signup below the fold on the homepage, if at all. It's still rare to see a SMS signup. Of course, it's better to use homepage real estate to drive a purchase, but if 90 percent of people come to your site and don't buy, get them to sign up for something that's addressable and of value.
The holidays are exciting and stressful times. Your plans are ready. You're set. However, there's more you can do to get prepared. Use these tips to free up some time, get through some bumps, acquire more email addresses, and create additional reach and frequency.
Jose Cebrian is the vice president and general manager of email and mobile messaging for Merkle, a customer relationship marketing agency that specializes in data-based marketing solutions.
