Quick Guide to Prepping your Email Marketing Program for Holiday sending
(Image by Amy Texter from Pexels)
It’s that time again when marketers are scrambling to put together their holiday strategy, make considerations for more competition and finalize all the loose ends of their technical projects before the sending madness begins. Are you ready?
Inbox competition increases by 46% in Q4 and unless you have the proper strategy in place, you could be facing deliverability issues, poor inbox performance and lower customer engagement. Regardless of industry you are in, you need to set yourself up for success as we quickly approach the holidays. Here are some quick tips from Martek Ventures to help you have a bright, happy & successful holiday season!
Get into the inbox
First and foremost, you have to get your emails in front of your customers. Deliverability is key here. You may have a good sender score and delivery rates in September, but that can quickly change by November. And, if by some chance your score drops during the peak season, you may be digging yourself out of deliverability issues all the way through December.
You should be emailing customers regularly throughout the year so when the holidays come your IP and From Name are familiar to them. If you haven’t been emailing customers regularly, start messaging them slowly with small lists. This will allow the email domains to start recognizing your IP as a safe sender so if a few customers click the SPAM button, the impact will be minor. Essentially, you will be re-doing your IP Warming in preparation for the peak season. Start now because November will be too late.
If you have never done an IP Warming with your list, don’t panic. It’s not too late to take a crash course and right the wrong. Run a Domain Report in your ESP to see the number of subscribers in each domain (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc.). Once you have figured out our many subscribers are in each bucket, create smaller lists that include no more than 20,000 of the subscribers from each domain. For instance, if you have 100,000 Gmail subscribers, 75,000 Yahoo Subscribers, 60,000 Hotmail subscribers and 20,000 AOL subscribers and 40,000 various domain subscribers, create 5 sets of lists each with 20K Gmail, 15K Yahoo, 12K Hotmail, 5K AOL & 8K other subscribers. Schedule the same email to go out to each of the 5 lists spacing the sends out no sooner than 24 hours. Example: the same email goes to List 1 on Monday, List 2 on Tuesday, List 3 on Wednesday, List 4 on Thursday and List 5 on Friday. Each day you will want to monitor your delivery rate to ensure that you are above 95% across all domains. If you are not above 95% for any of the major domains, you can work with their Post Masters to resolve the issue.
The best emails to use for IP Warming are ones that do not contain discounts or time constraints because you may need to adjust the send schedule if you do run into any blocking or filtering.
Stand out!
More emails are being sent by more brands during the holiday peak. This means your emails are not necessarily getting the attention that you and your team have worked so hard to get. If you are creating each email individually. You may be overworking and spending too much time on the design and build, leaving not enough time for strategy. Working from a set of pre-designed and built templates can help speed up turn around times and allow you to execute the strategy faster. While the design and coding of an email are VERY important, it’s not necessary to make each one a special snowflake. Sit down with your designers and development team to create 3 – 5 different templates that deliver your brand’s look and feel while highlighting the content that is most important to your business objectives and goals.
Using a template for each of your emails removes a lot of factors during execution. 1) Your creative team has signed off on the design so there will be less back and forth over branding considerations. 2) The code has been created and QAed so your header and footers links should be set up correctly and linking to the necessary pages. 3) Content blocks have already been established so there will be less scrutiny over layout, buttons or flow of the emails. This means approvals and sign offs come quicker and messages get to your customers in less time and with fewer headaches.
Spending time up front to create beautiful emails that are coded correctly will save a lot of time on the backend during crunch time. Your team can focus on the content and strategy that will grab your customers attention and get them click through.
Follow up with Journeys
Now is the time to get your journeys in place and remove some of the clutter of the execution. Whether you are needing product reviews, customer satisfaction results, or to make recommendations on additional purchases, you don’t need another thing added to your to-do list. You need Journeys that follow up with customers who haven’t responded. You need a Journey to recommend that product that goes along with the previously purchased item. You need a Journey to convert that abandoned cart into a sale. You need Journey Builder to minimize workload, grow your sales and hit your business goals.
Journeys help your brand connect with your customers to maximize your ROI. It’s the best way to ensure your customers are providing information that helps you deliver your product or services that keeps them as loyal customers.
If you’re needing additional support or consulting before the peak season hits, Martek Ventures is here to help. We specialize in Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementation and execution. We have helped several brands like you hit business goals by providing hands-on support from experts who have 10+ years of SFMC/ExactTarget experience, all while lowering the cost of execution. We can help you make money, save money and grow. You can get more information on how Martek Ventures can help by going to our contact page, and one of our experts will gladly discuss the next steps in developing a customer journey for your business or brand.
Schedule your free consultation today!
