Cover Story: The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Santa Email Marketing Strategies: Understanding Your Naughty List

Summer may be in full swing, but as the song goes, "You better watch out!," the holidays will be jingle belling at full blast before you know it. So think like Santa and get a head start on making your naughty and nice lists. Your subscribers have had time to show you whether they've been good or they deserve a lump of coal.

Some of your subscribers were just born bad, but that doesn't mean they'll always be rotten brats. Use the summer months to identify who is naughty and ways you can get them to be sweet, well-behaved subscribers on the nice list by the holidays. This means finding, keeping and focusing on the "nice list" of engaged, profitable subscribers while also working on the "naughty list" of disengaged, unresponsive and/or phony subscribers to take notice and start buying from you. And those who remain on the naughty list? Well, it may be time to cut them loose. Santa doesn't waste time delivering gifts to the naughty list, and neither should you.

The location for subscriber acquisition can group some of your nice subscribers with naughty ones. There are two significant acquisition channels that result in poor data quality and increased risks for blocking and other deliverability issues, which have the potential to destroy your holiday revenue goals. Understanding and improving these subscriber sources before the holidays start, and then monitoring them throughout the holiday season, will help improve data quality and decrease the risks of encountering blocks or a spike in spam complaints.

Point-of-sale (POS) acquisition: Your POS email subscriber acquisition is probably a mix of keyed entry or manually written email addresses, which can result in a blizzard of bad data. Customers can give false email addresses if they feel forced to provide one. Cashiers can either not hear the address correctly or not key the address properly, or may enter a random email address to avoid asking the customer for the information. When it comes to improving data quality, changing human behavior isn't practical; however, you can improve the processes that handle that data once it's recorded. Segregate new subscribers acquired at POS to their own list, welcome series and potentially sending IPs. Anticipate poor delivery, high unsubscribe rates and spam complaints, as well as low clicks, opens and conversions. Once the naughty addresses have been weeded out, you'll have a better view of who could earn their spot on the nice list.

Sweepstakes and contests: Everyone wants to be a winner. We've all swapped our contact information and personal data for a chance to win a gadget, gizmo or getaway. The value proposition for these sweepstakes and contests is usually the prize and not the stellar email program that will be sent weekly to entrants (who opted in when they entered, of course). Like POS, segregating this population to determine who will actually engage with your marketing efforts will help you to identify the naughty dead weight that just wanted to win your prize. Before the holidays begin, review your past sweepstakes’ lists to see how they've been performing. Ask yourself if the promotion provided long-term, engaged customers or just added dead weight to your list. Consider how this group may receive your increased holiday email volume. They may just ignore your emails now, but once you start sending more, they may start flagging your emails as spam, which could result in deliverability issues.

Finding ways to decrease deliverability risks and maximize emails to your best subscribers will not only help your sales numbers, but it will also ensure your customers have a positive experience shopping with your brand.

Jim Davidson is the manager of marketing research at Bronto Software, a cloud-based marketing platform provider. Jim can be reached at jim.davidson@bronto.com.