7 Ways To Get Your Customers to Read Your Holiday Emails

Fall may mark the turning of the season but it also heralds one of the busiest and most profitable quarters for consumer spending. With Black Friday and Christmas around the corner, there’s no better time to spiff up your business' email marketing strategy for more focused outreach, sustained customer engagement, and targeted results into the next year. 

Many consumer retail and ecommerce businesses make the majority of their sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas, especially now that COVID-19 has the majority of consumers shopping online for safety reasons. A Survey from the National Retail Federation (NRF) breaks down where consumers did their holiday shopping in 2019 (see Statista chart below). With various bricks and mortar stores on lockdown, expect online retail to get a significant boost over these numbers for 2020 holiday sales.

The advantage of email marketing in a predominantly online-focused consumer market is a frictionless conversion into sales. This is even more true for consumers that are on mobile devices with which they can not only shop, but also utilize mobile payments. However, reaching them can be a problem now that so many competitors are targeting the same segment. We consulted with marketing experts to determine some of the most effective email marketing tips to optimize your strategies for the holiday season.

“Marketers need to be working at peak capacity in the fall in order to drum up early interest from holiday shoppers. For companies that aren't as seasonally driven, the fall serves as a critical planning period to hit the ground running for a successful new year come January 1,” said Bodhi Debnath, senior director of marketing at Campaigner, one of our Editors’ Choice selections in the email marketing category along with MailChimp and HubSpot Marketing Hub.

(Editors' Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)

1. Personalization Is Critical

Today’s savvy consumers crave unique experiences and many of them appreciate a personal touch. The days of generic form emails are long gone as many of these look and sound spammy and often end up not being opened at all. It helps to put some thought into how you intend on engaging with customers.

“Send emails from a person, not from a generic marketing alias as it will have a higher chance of being viewed and not go to spam,” said Mark Kapczynski CEO at Gooten, a production and logistics company focusing on online stores. "Don’t send the same email to every person; create unique variants and AB test titles to see which ones drive more engagement," he added. "It helps to keep a comprehensive history of customers' past purchase data, and craft an email and an offer that's so on-the-nose, they can't help but click it."

“Personalization is absolutely critical,” agrees Jeff Kupietzky, CEO at Powerinbox, a multichannel messaging platform for publishers. “We know that personalized emails generate 26% higher open rates, improve click-thru by an average of 14%, and increase conversions by 10%. On the flip side, consumers have developed such high expectations for personalized content that 72% say they won’t engage with marketing content unless it’s customized to their interests.”

"It's a noisy world out there right now and since COVID," said Christina Daves, owner of PR for Anyone. "Everyone jumped online and is emailing like crazy. I'm actually finding my open rates have increased since COVID, but I am also focused much more on the subject line and the first few sentences making it intriguing, valuable, and about them!"

2. The Subject Line Matters

Shark Tank host and serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban gets around 1,000 emails a day, many of them are pitches for startups hoping to get business guidance or a financial investment from Cuban. In an interview with Inc. Magazine, Cuban said that he reads at least the first paragraph of every email. Conciseness and impactful opening paragraphs are key.

"The longer the back story, the worse the deal," Cuban said. It usually takes him about two seconds to decide whether to delete an email or answer it. He may only read the first paragraph or two. "90% are delete, delete, delete, glance, and delete," Cuban said.

"You have to cut through the noise and be able to 'hook' your customer in from the subject line," said Daves. "I'm not recommending clickbait tactics, but give readers a subject line that stops them long enough read it (we live in scroll nation right now) and has then wanting more so they will actually read your email."

“Focus on a compelling and interesting subject line; think of it like this, what title/subject line of an email would you want to open?” Kapczynski said. Thankfully, the fall season and the coming holidays offer a lot of opportunity to add some thematic flair to emails.

3. Mobility Reigns

The majority of users manage their email on their mobile devices, which is also where they do a lot of their shopping and make their mobile payments. Many email marketing and email automation apps can shift designs between desktop and mobile modes so that content is acceptable on either platform, but even this isn’t enough.

According to market research firm Statista, for the US in 2020, mobile internet traffic made up a total of 50.51 per cent of all internet traffic (see above graphic). Email marketing should be mobile-first and optimized for mobile screens and experiences. These can easily be reformatted to suit the desktop.

Mobile users are a captive audience, so crafting emails that stand out on mobile devices can lead to sustained engagement and quick sales.

“People read emails on-the-go on mobile devices, so make sure your the emails are mobile-friendly and not overloaded with heavy graphics that won't load easily,” Kapczynski said. ”While email is effective, it also pays to consider using text messages or SMS instead, this works for specific events like exclusive sales or discounts." Conveniently, many email marketing platforms, including our Editors' Choice winner, Mailchimp, allow users to move between email and SMS within a single marketing campaign.

4. Partner With Trusted Publishers

Email marketers know that it can take a long time to cultivate a mailing list as well as reach a desired audience. Experienced marketers often get into partnerships with trusted publishers or brands that already have an audience. Partnering through paid content or through banner advertising within a brand’s newsletter may be one way to fast-track access to more eyeballs.

“Partnering with trusted publishers to advertise within their email newsletters is also a huge opportunity for brand marketers. Two out of three email subscribers will click on an ad in an email that comes from a trusted sender,” Powerinbox's Kupietzky said.

Forming relationships with established brands can also help marketers get their name "above the fold," especially during the busy holidays. “With the proliferation of imposter ads for knock-off off products on Facebook and Instagram, people know they can trust emails they subscribe to for reliable and legitimate offers," adds Kupietzky.

5. Put Your Data to Work

Dan Sondhelm, CEO at Sondhelm Partners, which helps financial companies with their digital strategies, says that focusing on actionable data and maintaining engagement is an important method to diversify email marketing strategies.

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“Emails are a great way to get in front of your target audience. They allow you to learn the percent of your list that opened or clicked. But they don't tell you who is the most engaged with your digital content across channels such as a website visits, social media, and any personal sales efforts," said Sondhelm.

He added that it not only pays to capture the data from these other marketing efforts, it's actually critical to long-term success. Only by comparing results data across different mediums, customer segments, and time slices can marketers accurately determine their most engaged customers as well as their most effective content .

“These are the people who will most likely buy from you in the future. Conversely, those who are clients but stopped engaging digitally (emails, website visits, social media) may quickly become former clients," he said. Integrating email marketing with a solid customer relationship management (CRM) tool can yield useful data on engagement and improve customer success, as well as provide analytics on how and when to best approach customers.

5. Engagement Is King

“If you're counting only open rates and actual sales as key performance indicators (KPI) for a campaign, don’t be surprised if that campaign falls flat,” said Esther Poulsen, CEO and Founder of Raare Solutions, which helps companies develop CRM strategies. “Having CRM and data analysts onboard to identify the most meaningful metrics is essential in measuring marketing campaign success, and key to achieving brand loyalty in the long run.” Measuring engagement goes a long way in creating a sustained customer experience.

Poulsen said it pays off to go deeper than Open and Close for email marketing. Understanding the difference between click-throughs and actual conversions is an obvious step up from open/close basics. But Poulsen also thinks marketers should look at metrics such as how many unsubscribes they get across audiences, geographies, and time slices as well as bounce rates, forward rates, and even spam complaints. All of these show not just customer engagement, but also a more detailed understanding of how those customers are engaging.

“The amount of time the consumer spends on an email, as well as the number of times a specific email is opened, are strong indicators of worth. If they spend time reading the content, it's a strong indicator that the message isn't just using a 'spray and pray' sales approach. It shows the brand has taken the time to curate, compile, and tell a story that has meaning.”

7. Consider Multichannel and Social Sharing

Email marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum, far from it. To expand the natural reach of your campaigns, integrate it with social media management and analytics. Campaigner recommends embedding social sharing buttons for websites and applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter directly in your email content. The becomes a way of continuing the conversation with customers, possibly on some platforms that they prefer to use.

"Integrate your email campaigns' content and imagery across all social channels to have the most powerful impact on customers," said Campaigner's Debnath. "This will increase brand recognition when they see consistent messaging both in their inboxes and on social media."

“Go multichannel,” Poulsen added. “When the time spent is significant but does not result in conversion, you might need to invest in another touchpoint. For example, if a consumer spends more than 12 seconds on an email without engagement, this could be the opportunity to shift the message to direct mail or digital to reinforce the message.”

For more on email marketing strategy, check out this explainer written by PCMag.com's productivity expert, Jill Duffy.