We recently held a webinar where we discussed important planning tips as we enter the holiday season. Most online businesses are preparing to take advantage of the many enormous shopping days online with everything from black friday, cyber monday or even green monday deals. Here’s the top 4 things you should think about with regards to email deliverability for the holiday season.
1. Perform List Maintenance Often and Early
The holiday season is a time of heavy email traffic. Between numerous promotional offers and increased transactional email, be sure to have to get a jump start on list cleaning before the season. This will help ensure that your email reputation is in perfect shape to handle the increased volume of email to your recipient base. The increased volume of email without conducting list maintenance may leave your email going to the spam folder while everyone else is cashing in on Cyber monday deals!
2. Don’t Surprise Your Recipients
Be sure to not change up your email routine too much or you might be at risk of losing some of your engaged recipients. If you’re planning on sending significantly more email during the holiday season you may want to offer a seasonal unsubscribe in addition to your normal, one-click, unsubscribe. This will help keep your deliverability high while allowing your recipients that may be overwhelmed by the amount of mail in their inbox to stay engaged with your email program again next year.
3. Web Performance is important for Email too!
Many ecommerce managers know that there is a direct correlation between the speed of online transactions and money made through ecommerce websites. Don’t forget as you prepare for the extra load on your web servers, DNS latency, and other web performance items that Email should be considered as well! Your emails contain images and click redirects that are often served by the same servers. Optimizing performance on these servers will help you maximize your revenue.
4. Traveler friendly with Mobile
With over 40% of email now being read on mobile devices, and the holidays being heavy travel seasons, be sure to offer mobile optimized emails through easy scrolling, larger buttons, and mobile friend landing pages.
We hope this helps you make the most out of this holiday season! Let us know if you have any other tips or tricks by leaving comments below, emailing me or tweeting me!