The holidays are right around the corner and that means companies will be very busy dealing with:

• Scheduling employee vacations
• Helping customers who are looking for deals
• Navigating extra traffic both in store and online
• Wrapping up budgets for the following year

So how do you make a connection with your holiday emails when companies are super busy and on top of it all everyone is buying new products? Ultimately, you want your company to stand out from the crowd and to help you do this, we’ve come up with some tips to help make this holiday a happy one.

Start Now!

Be ahead of the game and make sure to plan out your emails and promotions ahead of time. You should even start sending some “pre-holiday” promotions now to kick off the season early to give customers a taste of what they’ll be getting.

Look back on past deployments

Take a look at your past deployment results. What worked? What didn’t? When are people opening their emails? What promotions garnered the most click-thru? What types of items sold the most? Then take a look at your current promotions and see what can be improved.

Reengagement Emails

Some customers only buy during the holidays. Make sure your segments include people who ONLY purchased in the past 12-16 months. You can also send just to those customers and give them a special discount if they purchase from you again this year.

Stock up on promotional items

If you’re having a sale, make sure to stock up to avoid inventory issues, cancellations and complaints from customers.

Mobile formatting

In recent studies¹, it was found that nearly $1 trillion (28%) of all retail sales were influenced by shopping-related mobile searches and 53% of those who shopped online, used smartphones or tablets. Make sure your emails and website are mobile-friendly and provide a call to action and links to buy the items you’re promoting.

Don’t OVER send

Customers are already receiving tons of marketing from other companies, the last thing they want is to clutter their email box by sending more than once a day. Segment based on interest or past purchases and making sure you send only the most important email out. Observe the unsubscribe rate and see where the numbers come in. Different industries and customers may have different tolerances. 

Use A/B Testing

Determine where the money comes in: Very often we see emails that are heavily content oriented rather than promotion oriented, or too much promotion and not enough content. We always recommend to have a good balance but around the holidays, promotions are usually what works best. Everyone is looking for a deal so make sure to use a Split Test to see what promotions/content variation works for you.

Change your Cart Abandonment during Holidays

The holidays are when cart abandonment rates are the highest. You may have had a great deal and a customer may have put everything in their cart and for whatever reason, they didn’t complete their purchase and missed the deal. During the holidays, including a limited time promotion on the Cart Abandonment emails will help you keep the sale even after the promotion has ended.

Post-Holiday Deployment

Think about what you want to send out after the holidays. Plan ahead because the holiday season might wear you out and having your post-holiday deployments ready is a big plus so you don’t need to think about them after the holidays.

¹Think with Google, 5 Holiday Shopping Trends to Watch for in 2015, July 2015