Article

3 email tasks to tackle before big holiday shopping season hits

With just a week or so to go before consumers start holiday shopping in earnest, retailers need to make sure these email marketing loose ends are tied up

September 29, 2015

By Will Devlin

You have been planning your holiday email marketing strategy for months now, perhaps even all year. Much of your company’s annual revenue comes from the retail holiday shopping season so this is no time to leave things to chance. So it might concern you to know there are a few things you may be overlooking that could derail your holiday email marketing efforts.

Below are three strategies to help you tie up holiday email marketing loose ends and prevent delays that turn holiday email campaigns into marketing misses.

1) Over-communicate with your email service provider.  

It is a good idea to alert your email service provider (ESP) of your holiday email marketing plans to avoid any delays in sending emails. This is especially critical if you normally send upwards of 10 million messages a month, but plan to double or triple your volume during the holidays. Let your provider know when you are planning to send your campaigns and how many emails you plan to send each time. This will allow your provider to scale up, if need be, to support the volume of messages you plan to send. Providers with cloud-elastic computing technology will have greater bandwidth to handle high-volume sends, especially during the holidays. The next step is to conduct load tests. Work with your provider to do load tests throughout the year to test email server capacity, keeping in mind that server send volumes will greatly increase during the holidays. Your provider can also help you determine optimal times to send messages during the holidays.

Now is also a good time to work with your email service provider to develop a communication strategy for handling technical issues during the busy holiday season. If there is a technical error that occurs in the thick of things, whom should you contact? Do you have to go through the standard process of submitting a ticket or is there an expedited way of communicating time-sensitive problems during peak holiday shopping days? You don’t want to wait to find out the answer in the midst of sending out your biggest email campaign of the year.  

2) Make sure your data is real-time

If you want your holiday email marketing to be a success, it is critical to distinguish between "real-time" marketing and "near real-time" marketing. Real-time marketing means getting a relevant message to people who will care about it when they are most likely to be interested. As is often the case with email, a little delay can mean that a real-time marketing opportunity turns into a near-real time opportunity. The risk of near-real time email marketing is that you may send a message that is no longer relevant to someone who no longer cares. Real-time email marketing matters all year long, but it is especially critical during the holiday shopping season when sales and special offers expire quickly and inventories sell out, sometimes in a matter of minutes. The last thing you want to do is send a product announcement to a customer who already purchased that item, or alert a customer of a great deal that is no longer available because the product has sold out when you could have featured another product.

Often the only barrier preventing near real-time email marketing from being real-time is the ability to send updated data to an email service provider and keep it in sync. As soon as data is replicated and sent to a software as a service (SaaS) marketing platform, it is out of date. The way to have real-time access to your data, including inventory levels, abandoned cart metrics and customer purchases, is to plug directly into your database while using a hybrid cloud application to do the heavy lifting of tasks that don’t require constant database syncing, such as email deliverability and tracking. By accessing data directly from a centralized database, it is possible to send dynamic content that updates in real-time. For instance, if a product goes out of stock before a batch of emails is sent, open-time optimization can update the email content to showcase a different product that is in stock. With real-time access to your data, you can also send countdown clocks that are accurate for when someone opens them, alerts based on what customers put on their wish list or announcements that let customers know when inventories are getting low.

3) Create a backup plan

You have your holiday email marketing plan in place, but do you have a backup plan for when things do not go exactly as expected? What is your backup plan if a website landing page is unavailable or your website goes down entirely? Which products will you feature if inventories sell out faster than expected? What will you do if you don’t receive the response you expect from your customers? What will you do if a coupon code doesn’t work? The more effort you put into creating a backup plan at this juncture, the less stress you will have when it is show time.

You may also want to review your service level agreement with your ESP to understand how much downtime you might have to prepare for during the busy holiday rush. Your ESP might guarantee 99 percent uptime, which sounds great, but what you may not realize is that 99 percent of uptime translates to about three and a half days of downtime per year. The downtime can occur at any point throughout the year, but, as Murphy’s Law dictates, it is most likely to happen during the busy holiday shopping season due to the massive amount of emails sent that time of year. If you are concerned about downtime during your busiest season of the year, you may want to switch to a provider with "four nine" (99.99 percent) of uptime or more, which means less than an hour of downtime per year.

As you can see, a little planning goes a long way to help maximize your holiday email marketing success.

Will Devlin is the director of marketing for MessageGears, an email marketing service that combines the power and security of on-premises software with the efficiency and scalability of cloud delivery. Devlin specializes in customer service, ecommerce, digital and tech marketing.