8 Strategies to Keep Your Business Email Reputation High During the Holiday Season
To help businesses maintain a high email reputation during the holiday season, we sought advice from eight industry professionals, including CEOs and Marketing Managers. Their insights range from personalizing your holiday email campaigns to running re-engagement campaigns. Dive into these valuable tips to ensure your email strategy remains effective and reputable throughout the festive period.
- Personalize Your Holiday Email Campaigns
- Prioritize Relevancy Over Quantity
- Safeguard Reputation with Clean Email Lists
- Engage Audience with Pertinent Content
- Monitor Emails for Accuracy with Technology
- Avoid Spammy Tactics, Maintain Brand Tone
- Respect Subscribers’ Inbox, Focus on Quality
- Run Re-engagement Campaigns
Personalize Your Holiday Email Campaigns
Personalization is key to maintaining a stellar email reputation during the holidays. Businesses can achieve this by segmenting their email list based on customer preferences and behaviors. Tailor holiday email campaigns with personalized subject lines, product recommendations, and exclusive offers to resonate with individual recipients.
This not only boosts engagement but also reduces the risk of spam complaints and unsubscribes, something successfully implemented in a career. Timing is crucial, too; avoid peak sending times to ensure emails shine in crowded inboxes.
Harshul Aggarwal
Senior Associate Marketing Manager, BeatRoute
Prioritize Relevancy Over Quantity
At Folderly, we noticed that a focused approach, particularly during this busy period, can amplify deliverability. In the festive rush, it’s tempting for businesses to send frequent emails or use click-bait, holiday-themed subject lines. Instead, focus on relevancy over quantity. For example, we segment our audience based on engagement and adjust our content to match. This boosts our conversion rate and keeps our sender reputation high.
Vladislav Podolyako
Founder and CEO, Folderly
Safeguard Reputation with Clean Email Lists
Maintaining a high email reputation is crucial because email campaigns can be a pivotal part of a marketing strategy, especially during the holiday seasons. One effective method to safeguard your email reputation is by carefully cleaning your email lists.
There are lots of providers who can scrub email lists, but they only make a basic ping to the recipient email server. Generally, sending to all the “good” emails is a good start, yet a 5% bounce rate can still be expected. Therefore, a more effective approach is to take all the “bad” and “catch-all” emails and give them to a provider who will send an email on your behalf. This way, your reputation is not damaged, and you still get more accurate email lists. Using this method, 30% of bad emails are actually good, which has a material benefit to email marketing.
Geoff Newman
Founder, Starget.co.uk
Engage Audience with Pertinent Content
A business can keep its email reputation intact during the holiday season by emphasizing the importance of engaging and pertinent content in its email campaigns. Rather than bombarding subscribers with generic promotions, tailor your emails to match their preferences and behaviors. Segment your audience based on past interactions and purchase history to send targeted and personalized content.
Also, consider implementing a re-engagement campaign to remove inactive subscribers. This not only improves the quality of your email list but also signals to email service providers that your messages are valuable to recipients. By consistently delivering content that resonates with your audience, you not only enhance engagement but also mitigate the risk of being marked as spam, thereby safeguarding your email reputation during the hectic holiday season.
Debbie Chew
Global SEO Manager, Dialpad
Monitor Emails for Accuracy with Technology
One way a business can keep its email reputation high through the holiday season is by using technology to monitor emails for accuracy. For example, employing automated spell-checking tools can help ensure that messages sent out are free of grammatical and spelling errors, which reflects positively on an organization’s professionalism.
By taking extra steps to ensure that all communications, such as emails, sent out during the holiday season reflect well upon the company, it will be beneficial in building trust from both consumers and investors.
Carly Hill
Operations Manager, Virtual Holiday Party
Avoid Spammy Tactics, Maintain Brand Tone
Maintaining a high email reputation through the holiday season requires avoiding the common “spammy” aspects that many businesses follow with their holiday email marketing campaigns. The temptation to push more marketing to attract your audience to certain products and deals can be strong, but this approach can often annoy your audience.
If there’s an email marketing schedule that is working well, it’s advisable to stick to that schedule during the holiday season. It’s also important to maintain your brand’s tone of voice with your marketing content to keep the connection with your audience.
Michael Maroney
Marketing Director and Lead Biologist, Infinite Outdoors
Respect Subscribers’ Inbox, Focus on Quality
You’re not an elf in the workshop—you don’t have to mass-produce marketing emails!
How many times have you received more than one promotional email from a company in a single day and sent them directly to your trash?
You don’t want your subscribers doing the same to you! So, respect their inbox and focus on quality over quantity.
While your subscribers are ready to shop more during the holidays and may be primed to receive more marketing emails than usual, spamming them with too many emails can quickly dampen their holiday spirit.
It’s okay for the frequency of your emails to pick up a bit during the holiday season, but try to avoid sending too many emails in a given day.
The more emails you send, the more your engagement, unsubscribe, and open rates will drop. The more these drop, the less likely you’ll be to make those great holiday sales.
If you’re looking at your analytics and this is the case, you may need to pull back on your daily sending.
Chelsea Evans-Flower
Owner, Scott Social
Run Re-engagement Campaigns
During the holiday season, upholding excellent list hygiene is essential to preserving a solid reputation for sending email. Maintaining deliverability requires that email lists be cleaned and updated regularly, with inactive or bounced addresses being removed.
Before the holidays, launching a campaign to re-engage inactive subscribers can assist in locating these subscribers and reigniting their interest in your content. In addition, customize holiday-themed content so that it resonates with recipients, which will reduce the likelihood that they will unsubscribe or report the email as spam.
Businesses can maintain a positive sender reputation throughout the holiday season by focusing on list quality, engagement, and relevance in holiday email marketing campaigns. This helps to ensure that their messages are delivered to customers’ inboxes and fosters continued customer trust during this crucial time of year.
Erik Pham
CEO, Health Canal
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