The holiday hub: deliver emails with impact this holiday season

Every holiday season presents new challenges that marketers have to adapt to – and 2022 is no different. Thankfully, there are plenty of things that can help us prepare our email marketing for the upcoming busy period that our businesses depend on. We’re here to help you stay ahead of what’s to come, provide you with resources that will help you to meet rising customer expectations, and understand why email deliverability is important. Here are some frequently asked questions and resources to help you kick off the holiday season.

Should I be sending to everyone on my list?

Be strategic. Show recipients that you respect them and that they’re more than just a number in your marketing database. Inbox exhaustion due to the sheer volume of emails being sent to recipients during the holiday time is very real. Resist the urge to send to all.

•  Build an email sending strategy focused on consent and active recipients who are engaging with the emails being sent to them.
• Segment contacts who aren’t engaging with your emails regularly and target them on other digital marketing channels.
• Respect those who are actively saying they don’t want to hear from you – unsubscribes are really important.

Where’s my email?

During busy periods mailbox providers are handling a lot. Year after year, Dotdigital alone consistently sends over double our usual daily volumes on Black Friday.

The huge jump in the number of inbound emails can mean that the journey of a mail through filtering and infrastructure to the inbox is slower than usual. Mailbox providers like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are likely to prioritize 1-to-1 emails if they’re busy, so you might receive Great Aunt Erma’s festive update email (she should really add an unsubscribe link) before marketing mail appears.

Additionally, sending reputation matters – particularly for larger sends. If you have a poor reputation, or the MBP deems your email in some way suspicious (e.g. because you’ve sent to spamtraps), they may release some emails to the inbox and then wait and see what recipients do with those emails. Depending on how their users interact with this first batch, the MBP will decide whether to deliver the rest of your emails – and to where (inbox or junk). This is why email deliverability is important all year round, but especially when prepping for the holidays when sales emails need to reach the inbox in a timely manner.

If you’re struggling with deliverability to internal stakeholders, this can actually be a great opportunity to start a conversation. Take a look at our advice on how to handle your emails landing in the CEO’s junk folder.

Why do our metrics look different this year?

Email has evolved significantly in the last couple of years, and your open and click-through rates may look significantly different this holiday season than in previous years. We’ve written about navigating deliverability analytics over the busy period, and you can also take a look at the following blogs about the industry changes that are causing this question:

• Apple iOS 15
• Non-human interaction
• The value of an open and other ways to measure success

Help! I need to know more about deliverability.

Learn about the six C’s of deliverability or check out our Deliverability 101 guide below to find out more about what it is and why email deliverability is important.