Give Your Shoppers a Gift of Better Emails This Holiday Shopping Season

As the holiday shopping season takes off, shoppers are bombarded with marketing emails from brands. But given that shoppers are concerned about inflation this year, how can email marketers ensure their communications attract customers? Jeremy Swift, CEO and co-founder, Cordial, gives a few tips.

As the winter holiday season takes off, an avalanche of marketing emails will hit subscriber inboxes, with brands vying for a share of holiday sales. Meanwhile, shoppers surveyed by CordialOpens a new window are bracing for a more stressful holiday season than in years past. They are worried about affording the gifts they want to buy and looking for ways to stretch their dollars amid inflation and economic uncertainty. Nearly 70% of consumers plan to buy less this holiday season. To win over subscribers, increase engagement and keep your brand top of mind into the new year, you will need to maximize the value of the messages you send. 

Here are some ways to help your holiday email marketing stand out. 

Choose Quality Over Quantity

Email has tremendous value as part of your cross-channel marketingOpens a new window efforts. Each message helps your brand foster a relationship with consumers, and as marketers, you have the freedom to use email as a canvas reflecting your brand’s personality. 

But not all email is created equal. Cordial’s latest Customer Engagement StudyOpens a new window found that 80% of consumers rank email among the top three sources driving their purchasing decisions. In fact, even as consumers tighten their gift budgets, they can be persuaded by the right message. The majority of Gen Z (68%), Millennials (72%), and Gen X (57%) consumers told Cordial they made an unplanned purchase after receiving a highly personalized email featuring something specific to their needs.

However, the vast majority of consumers (75%) say they receive too many emails from brands and feel frustrated when the emails they receive are generic. Instead of flooding inboxes and likely eroding brand loyalty, send fewer messages of higher quality. 

Improve quality with hyper-personalization. Including a recipient’s name in the subject line or email body is just the beginning. Truly personalized messages rely on real-time data built into your email orchestration. Customizing your communication to feature the products, services, promotions and content someone seeks results in stronger engagement and better overall marketing outcomes. Zero- and first-party data enables this kind of personalization. But to maximize data’s potential, it must connect seamlessly to your orchestration. While older email service providers struggle to make those connections, next-generation customer engagement platforms allow marketers to leverage data from any source at the time of sending, enabling the hyper-personalization customers want. 

See More: Why in-Game Is the Best Add To Holiday Marketing

Experiment With Festive Subject Lines

The winter holiday season is the perfect opportunity to cheer up your copy with jokes, puns and snappy references, starting with your subject lines. You have only a few seconds to capture your reader’s attention; the subject line is your gateway. 

A well-written subject line invites the reader to open your message, dive into your copy and click through to your website. A dull subject line is a detour sign, sending readers fleeing from your message and onto a different path. And personalization matters: technology that pulls in all your relevant customer data powers better time-of-send personalization, starting with the subject line.

An effective subject line will spark joy, while a lackluster one may land like a lump of coal. Consider these guidelines to improve subject lines all year round: 

• Use numbers to stand out.
• Aim for no more than five words.
• Ask a question.
• Make an emotional appeal.

Use language connoting immediacy, such as “today,” to encourage reader engagement, but beware of spam-triggering phrases like “act now.” Appeal to readers’ emotions with your subject line and preheader, but rely on a clever copy, not stylistic choices. All caps or a string of exclamation points often send messages straight to the spam folder. 

Once you have refined your subject lines, test them with a section of your audience and adjust as needed. Use a cross-channel marketing platform that supports experimentation with audience segmentation to customize the subject line further based on each subscriber’s subsegment. The right technology lets you go even farther, using machine learning to enable constant tests against content and swapping better-performing subject lines for weaker ones to keep up with consumer preferences.  

Change Your Time of Send

If you usually send your marketing emails at 9 a.m., you are not alone. Many brands send messages at the top of the hour, crowding readers’ inboxes and increasing the chances of your message getting lost. Use a less common time of send, like 10:17 a.m., and see the difference in engagement. To improve your broader time-of-send strategy, use a cross-channel marketing platform with insights into the optimal time for your contacts.

Reward Your Most Loyal Subscribers and Improve Deliverability

Use the holidays as an opportunity to lend a hand to your most loyal subscribers and reap the email engagement rewards. Nearly 90% of consumers told Cordial they planned to do the majority of their holiday shopping with brands and websites they have used in the past. And 88% percent agreed that they would rely more on discounts, sales and coupon codesOpens a new window this year than in the past. Deliver those promotions to your existing customers’ inboxes, and they will likely send more business your way. 

Be strategic about the recipients and timing of those offersOpens a new window . Because internet service providers (ISPs) generally favor email senders with high engagement, improve inbox placement for your follow-up messages by sending messages to your most engaged readers first. 

Prioritize sending special personalized promotions and offers to this group of readers, offering an exclusive deal or early access to a seasonal product or service. If you know a particular item might sell out early, tell your most engaged readers before you notify others.

See More: 6 Reasons Why Augmented Reality Should Be Part of Your Holiday Marketing Strategy

Use the Right Metrics in Context

For many years, open rate — the percentage of recipients who have opened your email — reigned supreme as the measure of email marketing success. A higher open rate indicated the effectiveness of your subject line, preheader text and sender name. But the value of the open rate has diminished in the last year with the introduction of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). 

The new measure hides recipient IP addresses and loads content privately, making it look like all emails have been opened and frustrating marketers’ efforts to gauge open rates accurately or reliably. The result? Some marketers report inflated open rates, and others can no longer access device and subscriber location or “time of open” details.

While marketers continue to assess Apple MPP’s overall impact on their email marketing, 62% of surveyed respondentsOpens a new window said they had prioritized different key performance indicators (KPIs) to account for the changes. Focus on metrics that capture better insights into customer behaviors, from the first click all the way to downstream KPIs like revenue. Many marketers leverage click rate as the new focal point for engagement. More meaningful and trustworthy metrics include site visits, orders, conversion and revenue per message.

Do not limit these strategies to your holiday email marketing campaigns. Prioritize quality over quantity all year round. Bring the power of real-time personalization to every campaign. And let creativity and experimentation, combined with great timing, improve engagement into the new year. 

As an email marketer, what steps have you taken to attract shoppers this holiday season? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

Image Source: Shutterstock

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