Thanksgiving is only weeks away and the other holidays are not far behind. It’s time to generate goodwill and engage with your base. Here are seven ways to help you improve and optimize your email campaigns during the holidays and all year long.

1. Learn from Last Year

No strategy decisions should be made without looking at what you’ve done in the past. So be sure to review everything that you did for the holidays last year. Examine old emails, offers, and messages, to understand what worked and what did not. Check open rates, click-through rates, sales and conversions as these all will help paint a picture of what your audience likes to see. It might also be a good idea to look at what your competition has done.

2. Dress Up Your Routine Emails for the Holidays

You may be planning to send out special seasonal mailings to your subscribers, but what about your regular messages? Adding seasonal design elements and holiday promotions to your routine, signature file, automated emails can help get your subscribers in the spirit of things, and get more mentions of your specials in front of them. Just don’t forget to switch them back to normal once the season ends!

3. Send Email Holiday Cards to Build Loyalty

Holiday card emails may only get opened by your customers and scanned for a split second, but that’s enough time for them to feel special. After all, think about all the companies each consumer interacts with and how many of them did not send holiday wishes. This puts you way ahead of them in this respect and that translates into greater loyalty to your company.

4. Run a Reengagement Campaign

A well-engineered reengagement campaign can get more subscribers interacting with your emails. What percentage of your email list consists of inactive subscribers — those who haven’t opened an email in 6 months or more? Just before the holiday season kicks into high gear is an ideal time to reestablish a connection with subscribers who were once actively interested in your products. So send them a special offer, such as a strong discount, new product samples, or free gift with purchase. In addition to helping keep your company top of mind during this busy season, an incentive offer may be just what’s needed to get inactive subscribers back among the actives on your email list in time for the holidays.

5. Take Advantage of Cart-Abandonment Recovery

As we discussed in a previous blog, cart-abandonment recovery provides a huge opportunity for increasing email-marketing return on investment. Essentially, cart-abandonment recovery involves setting up a trigger or drip campaign to be sent automatically to people who have started an online shopping cart, but never completed their purchase. The preset series of email messages typically contain increasingly aggressive incentives to encourage users to return and complete their purchase. Considering that an estimated 60% to 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, the potential income recovery is especially great during the high-volume holiday season. According to a recent Forbes article, marketers can recover an estimated 10% to 30% of their abandoned shopping carts by using a sequence of follow-up emails to remind abandoners that they still have items left in their carts.

6. Score Holiday Points with Email

When considering your eGreeting, think about the image you want to project to your list. Do you want to display your fun side, or is it important to your brand to reflect a more formal presence?

7. Keep Mobile in Mind

According to Google’s Holiday Retail Mobile Insights:

• 15% of “Black Friday” searches will be from mobile devices.
• 44% of searches for last-minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices.
• 33% of tablet and smartphone users intend to start holiday shopping before Thanksgiving.

So as you design your promotional emails, be sure they’re mobile-friendly. Adding a “view on mobile” link in your preheader, using shorter subject lines, as well as keeping the email width to 640 pixels or less (350 to 500 is often optimal for mobile) and file sizes to 20K or less, are examples of how your emails can work well for mobile users, too.

Getting the best results from a holiday email campaign requires a comprehensive strategy, effective implementation, and continual improvement of a number of components that work together to deliver against your campaign goals. The experts at OpenMoves can help you improve and optimize your organization’s email campaigns during the holidays and year round. Contact us or give us a call at 631-546-7779 and get your holiday game on!