Webinar Recap: How to set up your email marketing for the holiday season 

The concept of the domino effect is especially true when it comes to holiday season. Since people tend to buy a lot this time of the year for different occasions, businesses often run special offers giving them more reasons to buy. However, many of these businesses fail to see the bigger picture by setting their eyes only on instant sales. The holiday season is also a great time to welcome and engage new leads and convert them, so it’s important to make sure your email marketing is properly set up to take advantage of this opportunity.

In our recent webinar, we discussed how to do this by engaging your existing contacts with holiday-themed emails while conventionally onboarding your new ones and slowly shifting gears.

 In case you didn’t get a chance to attend, you can watch the video below.

Here’s a quick rundown of the conversations we had during the webinar:

How often should I send emails to my audience? 

It depends on the pulse of your email contacts. If your contacts are actively engaging with your emails, you can send two per week. That said, you should ideally send the second email only to those who opened the first. Targeting your contacts based on their behavior is the best way to safeguard your domain’s reputation and drive sales.

This ‘behavioral targeting’ becomes a breeze when you have email automation workflows at your disposal. For example, let’s say you need to send a series of promotional emails—you can automatically trigger individual follow-up emails to contacts that are uniquely tailored based on whether or not they opened the first email. You’ll just have to configure your messages and define the send time. Zoho Campaigns allows you to do this easily with drag-and-drop workflows.

 What’s the best day and time to send emails? 

The most fundamental step is making sure your contacts are in a position to open the emails. Put simply, your emails should arrive at their inbox when they’re awake. So be sure to launch your email campaigns during the daytime. With Friday being the penultimate day of the week—when a lot of people have mentally checked out—and Monday being the immediate day after the weekend—where people may or may not have mentally checked back in, not to mention the sheer amount of weekend emails they’ll be sorting through—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are generally considered the best days. Now comes the next question: how do I increase my open rates? This challenge is met when you schedule your email campaigns according to your recipients’ time zone or their optimal open time. The latter is an average time calculated based on their previous open times.

How should I design my holiday emails? 

Holidays present you with a great chance to experiment on the design front. You can create eye-catching and colorful newsletters that uplift the festive mood of your recipients. Make it a point to use one of the main colors that goes well with your brand logo and avoid predominantly using only one color. You can even add GIFs to your holiday email templates to make things more interesting.

Furthermore, don’t add too much text in your email. Proper usage of white space improves their readability.

Once the design part is over, be sure to preview your emails. Email testing tools like Litmus help you see how your emails render across platforms and devices so you can make any necessary adjustments. Zoho Campaigns tightly integrates with Litmus to ensure you deliver highly responsive emails to your audience.

How do I increase my open rates through subject lines? 

First things first, make sure your subject lines are highly relevant to the purpose of the email. Keeping the length between 21-30 characters is another box you should tick off. Moreover, adding a pre-header will give your readers a clear indication of what to expect inside your email. Considering it’s the holiday season, you can also play around with different emojis in your subject lines to give a playful and festive feel. For example, you can add a Santa Claus or snowman emoji for Christmas promotions.

We hope this recap of our webinar was helpful. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask them in the comment box below.