6 Ways to Make your Holiday Emails Stand Out in the Crowded Inbox

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year for email marketers. Brands compete to promote their business and put utmost efforts into creating the merriest of holiday email campaigns. This year, trends like interactivity and machine learning have taken over and they can be used to get better results out of your holiday campaigns.

Have you started planning for Holiday season 2017? Are you stuck somewhere and seeking suggestions to make your emails stand out from the rest? Well, we are here to help you out with making your holiday planning simpler.

In this blog, we take you through the trends to follow and the ways to include them in your holiday email templates to make your brand stand out in the customers’ crowded inbox. Read on to find out.

1. Plan and Schedule, NOW

Start planning for your holiday emails from September itself. Christmas in July and Black Friday Sale in July are some campaigns that brands run in order to provide their customers with a preview of what they can expect during the holidays.

2. Segment your Email Database and Send Tailored Messages

Relevant emails make for better customer engagement. Segmenting your email database and sending tailored and targeted emails increase the effectiveness of your holiday campaign. A study by MailChimp shows that segmented campaigns draw better results than non-segmented campaigns. Take a look:

Open Rates	14.31% higher
Unique Opens	10.64% higher
Clicks	100.95% higher
Bounce Rate	4.65% lower
Unsubscribe Rate	9.37% lower

To make your email campaign effective, collect data from your customers and group them into various segments based on their interests, purchase behavior, and demographics. Next, create personalized, tailored emails for each group and send them accordingly to engage maximum customers.

When you get your segments right, you will be able to send your customers relevant emails with information that they actually wish to receive. The closer you get to understanding the customer behavior, the better you will be at tailoring the holiday emails, drawing better responses and boosting conversions.

3. Make the Subject Lines Intriguing

Holidays are all about enhancing sales and engaging customers. To make sure you garner the customers’ attention in the crowded inbox, you need to make the subject lines intriguing and enticing. The subject line is the first thing that the customer sees and the most important factor that prompts the customers to open and view your emails. Make the subject lines useful, memorable, and specific; add a sense of urgency to them to drive more engagement. Along with the subject line, the pre-header text is also something that the viewers notice first. Using emojis in subject lines helps in increasing the open rates and lets you stand out. Check out the top holiday email subject line ideas that you can incorporate in your holiday emails here: Top 35 Holiday Email Subject Lines to Boost Open Rate.

4. Induce Engagement with Interactivity

When your customers’ inbox is overflowing with emails, it is easy for your brand’s emails to be overlooked. Interactivity is the hot trend and using it in your holiday emails can help in capturing user attention and engaging them in your brand’s emails. More use of visual elements such as animated GIFs, videos, gamification and interactive elements such as sliders, counters, and menus will help in driving engagement and conversions. Leverage kinetic email design and make sure to consider your subscriber audience and design a safe fallback experience where interactivity is not supported.

5. Incorporate Machine Learning

Machine learning lets you send relevant, engaging and timely emails to your customers. It lets you craft individual emails for each of your subscribers, thereby letting you have a 1:1 communication with your subscribers. Instead of sending a single email to everyone on your list, send a limited amount of content that is more likely to engage them.

6. Combine Email with Social

Your customers may not necessarily access emails during the peak holiday season. It is therefore important to run your email campaigns on all major social media platforms. Make your holiday email offers available across all channels like email, blog, socials, etc.

If you haven’t started your holiday email planning yet, it’s high time you do so. Check out our infographic Holiday Email Marketing Tips and Trends- Experts Speak that discusses tips and trends by email marketing experts for this holiday season.