A practical pre-holiday playbook for email marketers

TL;DR

The winter shopping holiday season is a key time for email marketers, driving a significant amount of revenue, but also creating a number of serious deliverability risks. To make the most of campaigns during this time of year, marketers need to take a holiday-specific approach to email deliverability and marketing approaches, including promotion-specific IP warming.

Key takeaways

• The winter holiday period sees higher than average deliverability risks due to increased send volumes, deeper mailbox provider scrutiny, and a tendency among marketers to try and message disengaged subscribers
• Warming your IPs for the winter holidays is similar to general IP warming, and you should make a point of starting early, and being thoughtful about the audience you’re sending to and the relevance of your communications
• To assess the success of your prep efforts, make sure to keep an eye on your open rate, your bounce rate, and your spam complaint rate, among other metrics

For most email marketers, the winter holiday season is a critical time for their businesses. Audiences are often more receptive and brands tend to offer up their strongest offers, creating a massive opportunity to realize revenue. At the same time, campaigns sent during this time can also present risk to senders' hard-earned reputations, making it important for brands to approach their holiday campaigns with care. Thankfully, a proactive, well-planned approach can empower senders to effectively navigate this high-stakes environment.

Why is the holiday season uniquely risky for deliverability? There are three contributing factors:

• Re-engagement with dormant subscribers: The lure of more receptive audiences tempts marketers to expand their selections to capture additional revenue. That urge to send to a wider audience (if not their entire list) sometimes overwhelms marketers’ commitment to best practices and can lead to risky decisions. The truth about those disengaged subsets is that they contain enough risk to give any sender pause. Increased complaints, spam traps, and other negative reputation signals make it really difficult to manage the risk associated with messaging these audience members. Too often, senders targeting dormant subscribers find themselves blocked or placed into spam with no immediate remedy from providers.
• Increased send volume: A wider selection of products or offerings often means a sharply increased send volume. However, a sudden increase in email volume can make a sender look like a bad actor. Mailbox providers often react to major changes in email volume by deferring delivery of a sender’s high-value offers and, if the increase is especially egregious, brands can experience a lingering impact to sender reputation, stunting conversions during what should be a bountiful time of year.
• Heightened mailbox provider scrutiny: Email traffic surges regardless of industry during this time of year and bad actors in the space often seize on the opportunity to infiltrate recipients' mailboxes with clandestine attempts to steal personal information or payment details. Mailbox providers (like Google and Microsoft) are on record saying that this is a time of increased scrutiny, so senders that want to have their email delivered during this time need to clearly demonstrate that they are not a threat.

Safely expanding the sending list and segmentation strategies

Shifting tactics from a high-risk "send-to-all" approach to one built around safely expanding a sending domain’s reach can yield dividends. Here’s a few ways to make that happen:

• Warm up lapsed data…slowly: Avoid sending messages to the entirety of an old list all at once. Bringing back inactive users in a gradual manner can help avoid deliverability issues, especially if you’re considering including contacts who provided consent to message them more than a year ago.
• Utilize preference centers: Integrate a regular preference center into your email program to keep send practices in line with what users want. Empower users to choose the frequency at which they receive mail (or even pause emails) can provide an alternative to unsubscription and let the user know that you care about their experience. In addition, it demonstrates that the address is one that the user responds to and maintains.
• Proactive outreach: A dedicated email before the holiday rush begins can let users know what to expect so that they are not caught off guard or antagonized by increased email presence from a sender. Being transparent that sending will increase and offering an option to update their preferences. Clarity in the call to action of this message can yield dividends (e.g. "Too much holiday mail? Click here to get fewer updates") and help generate good will toward the sender.
• Make it easy to unsubscribe: Recipients who find it difficult to unsubscribe from mail are more likely to complain about its arrival. These complaints to mailbox providers can erode consumer confidence and hurt sender reputation. Better to have a recipient unsubscribe from your messages than complain and threaten your email program as a whole.

List warm-up considerations for peak season

The retail season tends to peak around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but this guidance can apply for any peak season where volumes have potential to be larger than your standard sends. If a sender anticipates a large volume jump, the best course is to plan for a "Seasonal Warming" to prepare providers for the kind of volume they will see at peak seasonal volumes. Some best practices for this kind of warming include:

• Plan ahead and start early: When expecting a big jump in volume, senders should start their steady ramping to maximum volume gradually. Typically, a span of 3 to 4 weeks before the holiday is sufficient, but user engagement is still relevant during this time so the increased volume should prioritize quality and relevance as much as possible.
• Engaged subscribers first: Seasonal warming should start with marketers emailing their most engaged subscribers—that is, those who frequently open and click. Beyond just recency of engagement, marketers should think about when each audience member granted or reaffirmed consent since that sort of engagement could signify the user’s last interaction which makes them less ideal for warming segments. Users who have recently granted consent are the higher quality of lead and serve to bolster sender reputation. Continuing to provide receivers with strong signals of positive reaction should be done before mailing less engaged or older segments.
• Plan for pause: If during this warming process, engagement drops, trap hits increase, or complaints rise, stop increasing volume and wait two to three days for things to settle down. The last thing a sender wants to do is give themselves reputation issues in advance of these peak times.

What to monitor closely to catch issues early

It is crucial for senders during this time to be proactive when expanding their volume with providers and once the holiday sends begin in earnest. Senders with high volumes of Google or Microsoft domains should leverage the feedback they provide: For Google, they provide Postmaster Tools which can provide important feedback to senders that can guide the process; for Microsoft, their Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) provides senders with data to base decisions on.

Absent a provider or other tool to apply, the most important metrics to track are open rate, bounce rate, and complaint rate as these best reflect recipient disposition to a sender’s mail.

• Key monitoring benchmarks:
  • Spam complaint rate: A rate below 0.01% is a goal for most senders to aim for. When the rate starts to increase beyond that point, it can be a warning sign that adjustment is needed. Should the complaint rate exceed 0.3% or higher, senders should pause sending and work to locate the source of complaint so that it does not blossom into a reputational concern.
  • Bounce rate: Hard bounces above 2% are indicative of list quality problems, whether that’s the result of lead gen issues or reflective of the age of a given list. Should senders find that their hard bounce rate exceeds this rate at any particular provider, they should stop sending and locate the source of the increase of this negative reputation factor, then work to address the issue.
  • Open rate: Low open rates (below 30%) can be a telling indicator of placement problems, chronic audience fatigue, or genuine disinterest, all of which have the potential to undermine most businesses’ engagement and marketing goals during the winter holidays. Many providers also see this metric as an indicator of a sender’s desirability—and the absence of these signals might lead the provider to limit the amount of mail they will deliver or to take other measures that could undermine holiday sending.
  • Deliverability rate: The target rate for acceptance of email is above 98%. Lower rates indicate the provider has issues with what a sender is sending, how much they are sending, or other content that’s being sent. If you’re seeing a rate that falls below that mark, taking action is essential—if your messages aren’t being delivered, it won’t matter how brilliant the call to action may be…the recipient won’t see it.

Final thoughts

Peak seasons can be wonderful times of the year as goodwill is in abundance. Senders who make the effort to continue the trend of goodwill by adhering to best practices and avoiding pitfalls via the actions described above can reap the benefits of some of the most receptive consumer audiences of the year.

Interested in learning more about deliverability? Check out our guide, Demystifying Email Deliverability.