For consumers, the holiday season is quickly approaching – but we know that for many marketers, it’s already here! Long before shoppers wait hours to get into their favorite store or feverishly refresh their web page to catch the big deals, most marketers have spent countless hours preparing for their busiest season. Email marketing is certainly no exception (nor should it be!) since eCommerce sales rang up more than $42 billion in the 2012 holiday season.
Email is a huge driver of revenue year-round, but even more so during the holiday season. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Free Shipping Day, and other major shopping days are pushed heavily via email. The volume of email in the average consumer’s inbox goes up exponentially during the holidays, which can make it even harder to stand out among the crowd. But what if your email never even reaches the inbox?
While email deliverability isn’t something that only applies during the holidays, delivering smarter can be especially vital during this time of year. It’s more important than ever to make sure your mail not only gets delivered, but also makes it to the inbox where it can be seen and acted upon. But with recent shakeups at Gmail and Yahoo, in addition to everyday delivery challenges, what can you do to optimize your inbox placement?
Big changes from big players
Gmail and Yahoo have both made recent changes that could have an impact on the holiday shopping season. Gmail’s recent introduction of the Tabbed Inbox has shaken up many marketers who fear their messages may be banished to the Promotions tab instead of the user’s Primary view. And Yahoo recently deactivated and reassigned many aging usernames, prompting fears of sending unwanted or personally-identifying mail to the wrong user.
Ready to engage
Reader engagement has come to be one of the biggest factors in getting your message delivered to the inbox. If you are sending to subscribers who open your emails and click on links, and not to those who would delete it or mark as spam, you are greatly increasing your likelihood of inbox delivery across the board. With the influx of emails at the holiday season, you’ll have to step up your game to get those all-important opens and clicks.
If it’s not already, email deliverability should be very high on your priority list for the holiday season – and WhatCounts can help! We’ll be speaking in more depth about these deliverability “hot topics” and how they affect you in our upcoming webinar, Deliver Smarter: Insights on Reaching the Inbox. Join us today at 2 p.m. ET if you want to get involved in the conversation.
Brad Gurley
Director of Deliverability, WhatCounts
bgurley@whatcounts.com
@DeliveryCounts
