Don’t Make These 4 Holiday Email Campaign Mistakes

Any marketer knows that during a holiday season it's important to connect with your audience by sending relevant and timely offers and information. Make sure you're creating the most positive impression you can. As the holiday season is coming, take a moment to review these tips to ensure that your seasonal email campaigns are your most effective yet.

Table of contents

Now is not the time to rekindle old relationships

Try not to overwhelm your recipients or recipient servers

Make unsubscribing easy

Don't miss the opportunity to send non-selling tips and a thank you!

Now is not the time to rekindle old relationships

Trying to reconnect with old subscribers during the busy holiday season is not a good idea. Sending to old or inactive addresses on your list can jeopardize your current account reputation. You could end up sending to a lot of invalid addresses or even hit a spam trap. Recipient servers can end up slowing or blocking your mail and this can mean you won't be able to reach the inbox of those who really want and expect your mail.  If you want to try and re-introduce yourself to that old subscriber list you need to do it at another time and very carefully using good list management practices.

Try not to overwhelm your recipients or recipient servers

Even if you've got a lot of relevant offers, deals and sales, it's important to respect that your recipients are busy and potentially overwhelmed with email. You definitely don't want to give them reason to use the unsubscribe because they are hearing from you too often. Pay close attention to your logs and reports and then make decisions based on how well your mail is being received. This should help you determine how often and at what times you are best to send. In addition, if you suddenly blast out hundreds or thousands of extra emails when normally your volume is consistent, recipient servers often register these large, sudden campaigns as spam and then throttle or block the mail. You'll want to avoid this by either gradually increasing your volume or staying consistent.

Make unsubscribing easy

This shouldn't be a complicated process. Protect your account and sender reputation by making the unsubscribe an easy to find, one step process. You can find out more about the importance and requirement to add an unsubscribe link here.

Don't miss the opportunity to send non-selling tips and a thank you!

This is a great time of year to give back (any time of year is really!). Why not offer your recipients a few fun tips about your products or services along with thanking them for their loyalty and interest. Let your customers, group members, followers and readers know that you really appreciated their support and perhaps even consider offering them a free gift or at least a chance to offer feedback by sending out a short survey. There are lots of ways to make sure your contacts feel appreciated, now's the time to make sure they do.

If you have any other proven tips for holiday email campaign, feel free to share them with us!

Anna Wybieralska