Holiday campaign planning

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

We know it’s only October and summer is just underway, but it’s time to plan for the Christmas holidays. If you’re in the retail or travel industry, you know that busy season is here and you don’t want to miss out on the potentially smaller buying pool that may result from a population suffering ‘post-traumatic recession disorder’.

When considering your holiday campaign strategy, there are several things to keep in mind besides developing your messages and offers. These include frequency, targeting, and design. We’ll look at each of these below.

Frequency

One of the most common traps to fall into when trying to get attention and grab sales during the holiday season is to increase the frequency of your email campaigns. There can be tremendous pressure from senior management to blast out more emails to get more sales. However, the pitfalls of such a strategy could severely impact your email marketing program far beyond the holiday season.

Firstly, your subscribers could end up quite irritated at the increase in emails hitting their inbox. Loyal customers might be forgiving, but you risk the wrath of a large number of your subscribers ignoring your campaigns, hitting the delete or spam button, or simply opting out from your list altogether.

Secondly, not only do you risk your reputation with subscribers, you risk damaging your sender reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and your ability to get your messages to the inbox. ISPs are increasingly looking at the actions of recipients as a factor in determining a sender’s reputation. For example, Yahoo will be incorporating such metrics as opens, clicks and actions such as moving a message to the junk folder as part of their sender reputation measurement.

Frequency should only be increased where there is relevancy to your audience. This leads into the next area to consider – targeting.

Targeting

Holidays aside, relevancy is an important part of an effective email strategy. Providing content and offers that are relevant to your recipients will increase your response rates significantly. This is particularly important in your holiday campaign planning to drive the most sales possible.

If you know your subscriber’s preferences you can send them content and offers that are relevant to them. For example, 10% off flights to Sydney would not appeal to someone living in Sydney. If you haven’t built a significant enough profile yet on your subscribers, there are still ways you can target different segments of your database.

You can segment your list based on their engagement history with you. Subscribers that actively engage with your emails on a regular basis are more likely to respond favourably to an increase in frequency over the holiday period. You could also provide this group with exclusive special offers as a reward for their loyalty. Keep a close eye on your results though and watch for any negative signs so you can alter your strategy if needed. This is a group you don’t want to lose.

New subscribers are another engaged segment, but one that could get disillusioned quickly if emailed too frequently too soon.

Finally, there are the non-responders – those recipients who have not engaged with you for quite some time. If you haven’t already cleaned your database of people no longer engaged, you might want to consider this in your holiday strategy. Use this time as an opportunity to re-engage these subscribers with a special offer and encourage those that aren’t interested to opt-out.

Design

There can be a tendency with holiday emails to ignore best practice design principles in an effort to stand out from the crowd. Large, bold imagery may make an eye-catching design, but it will be to little effect if it doesn’t reach the inbox.

Don’t risk damaging your sender reputation over the holiday period as the recovery time will be much greater.
Following best practice doesn’t have to mean boring. Effective image design and placement and creative use of colours can still get your email noticed. And remember, it’s the message or offer that is most important in getting results.

If you need help planning, targeting or designing your holiday campaigns this year, contact us today.