holiday season
Preparation for the holiday send season — is it too late? Yeah, might be. BFCM is upon us. It’s too late to warm new IP addresses or domains, for example. However, there is one simple trick you can still implement, even now, to help deliver mail better (and possibly faster) during this peak season. Consider this: Almost everybody times their campaign launches to go out at the top of the hour, or the bottom of the hour. Exactly. Think a 6:00 am launch or a 9:30 am launch. On the hour, or on the half hour. Because everybody does it that way, mailbox providers are besieged with an onslaught of email messages, all at once, at zero minutes, and thirty minutes, past almost every hour. Which means that this can make it hard for everybody’s mail to get through the door, and it could even end up causing email processing
Lots and lots of holidays, events and special days are approaching. Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Small business Saturday. Cyber Monday. Giving Tuesday. Christmas. Kwanzaa. Hanukkah. (And more!) And for each of these, somebody somewhere wants to send an email about it, probably to sell something. This is the busy season. This fourth quarter of the year is prime time for email marketing efforts. Everybody is ramping up. Inboxes are more full than at other times of the year, because so many folks send as much as they can, looking for as much of that email-related revenue as possible. This brings the question: how does one prepare for deliverability success during this time? My colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz, along with Gene Gusman from Zeta, recently presented a free webinar on this topic (good stuff – check it out!) and I though it would be good to add my own two cents. The
You fully prepared for the holiday season, and you’ve survived, and hopefully, thrived! Where does that leave us in January? I think it’s a great time to review marketing strategy and technical settings — allowing us to answer the question: What can and should you be doing now to position yourself for future deliverability success?Allow me to offer up five quick tips.Review your dedicated IP address strategy. Do you have enough IP addresses to support your desired max daily email volume? I recommend sending no more than 2 million messages per day from a single IP address. Now’s a good time to warm up additional IPs, if needed.Review your domain segmentation choices. Got enough mail to separate the mail streams by domain or subdomain? Transactional versus marketing? Brand X versus brand Y? If you send enough email volume per stream to be able to separate it out, now is a
Back in the day, these used to be called Postmaster Pages (or Postmaster Sites) and they are where email senders would go to look for help when having deliverability issues. Wondering what to do about mail bouncing at a mailbox provider or internet service provider? Need to submit a ticket to request that the mailbox provider reconsider mailbox placement? Those Postmaster Pages are where you’d find info and links.Do keep in mind that these contacts are not a “get out of jail free” card. Deliverability is generally reflective of sender practices and mailbox providers are loathe to grant free rein in the inbox to those who send unwanted mail. In other words, bad senders asking to get unblocked will often be told no, or will find themselves blocked again if they continue to send the same mail to the same lists that caused the initial blocking. If you’re getting blocked
It’s time! Pumpkin spice has only just arrived but smart marketers know that the sooner you can begin to prepare for deliverability and marketing success for the year-end holiday season, the better. That’s why my Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz and I put together our top tips on things you SHOULD and SHOULD NOT do if you want to keep yourself out of the spam folder this holiday season. You can find the article (and a link to the recorded webinar) over on the Kickbox blog.
Forget holiday shopping; it’s supply chain issues that are making headlines. While email marketers will still mark those big dates in the holiday marketing calendar, the real winners will be the ones who take a more agile approach to the season. This year at Mailjet, we’re telling our clients to go early, forget discounting, and keep their customers in the loop. Table of Contents What’s causing the supply chain crisis? Navigating supply chain issues with email The early bird marketer catches the worm Inventory updates via email The right email designs for holiday marketing Transactional emails and dynamic order tracking Essential email marketing best practices Supply chain crisis management Opportunities for creative email marketers What’s causing the supply chain crisis? If you’re looking for something to blame for the crisis, you’ll find many different culprits. From the global pandemic causing delays in manufacturing to an acute shortage of truck drivers…
Just recently, I shared my top five (plus) tips on how to be prepared to maximize deliverability success this holiday season.It’s a starting point, and I hope you found it useful! But what if we take that to the next level? And by “we,” I mean not me. Somebody else beat me to it — Konstantinos Karagkounis, Deliverability Operations Lead at Emarsys.Here he explains what makes 2021’s holiday email marketing season different — noting that this year, consumer behavior is different, Black Friday’s trends are always pointing upwards, and we’ve got a Black Friday “triplet” considering that “Black Friday is now perceived as a week-long event or even something that stretches to the whole of November for certain retailers. It usually ends with Cyber Monday’s week offers, only to start a new cycle of offers and promotions for the Christmas and New Year Holidays’ season.” He goes on to provide additional…
It’s pumpkin spice season! Can you feel the chill in the air? Me, neither — today’s projected high temperature is 77 degrees (F) here in my adopted hometown of Chicago. Nonetheless, now is when savvy email marketers should be preparing for deliverability success ahead of the upcoming holiday season. The fourth quarter of the year is a big one for email senders, especially retailers. Success involves planning, and planning starts now. (Or a month ago, if you’re really ahead of the game.)