Improving Email Deliverability Over the Holiday Season

4 min readDec 11, 2020

You likely already know that email is a tried-and-true marketing channel, not just over the holidays, but throughout the entire year. Of course, with more people staying at home and indoors this season, the pressure is on to get your message in front of more eyes than ever. Unfortunately, that’s the same end goal for every other business out there as well.

So what can you do to make sure that your emails get noticed by your users and customers first before your competitors? At Workdom, we face challenges like this every day. Here’s what we recommend to not only ensure that your emails get seen, but for it to get acted upon.

The Real Dangers of Email Fatigue

Email fatigue, also known as inbox fatigue, is a real and ever-present problem, especially now. People are receiving so many emails, not to mention holiday offers, that the sheer overwhelm makes them want to throw their hands in the air and move everything to the trash (or even worse, mistakenly marking it as spam)

And while this seems like an understandable reaction on the part of the consumer who’s being bombarded with too many offers and too many emails, it can impact you negatively by falsely categorizing your messages as spam or junk mail, which can in turn have repercussions that further inhibit your ability to send emails.

The unjust thing about all of this is that you, specifically, didn’t do anything wrong. So what can you do about it?

Give Your Subscribers Options

Before you go through and purge your inactive subscribers, send out one more email letting them know that they can easily update their preferences through their account or email management settings. Depending on the email marketing service that you use, you may also be able to allow users to self-segment by letting them choose whether to receive just sales announcements, latest news or whatever other segmentations you want to make with your email list. In addition, you could also invite them to change the frequency of how often they want to receive emails from your business. Giving your subscribers the power to control these settings may benefit your company more since it shows you care about their user experience.

Since there’s no “one size fits all” approach that works here, it’s worth looking at your analytics, not just over the holiday season but overall, and see if you can spot any patterns in terms of unsubscribes or bounces.

Resist the Urge to Resend a Poorly-Performing Email

If a particular email didn’t get much traction, you may think it’s just a fluke and resend it again, but there are a myriad of reasons as to why it might not perform well — timing, offer, or any other number or combination of themes. Your instinctive reaction may be to just resend it, but don’t.

Instead, set up a split test — change the subject line or other details about the email, but leave other parts of the email as they are. If you change too many variables (like the images used in the email, the offer itself, or other parts, you won’t know what exactly, if any, led to the improved conversion rate. Plus, sending out an email again “as is” will greatly increase the chances that it will be marked as spam, and thus further impact your email deliverability and lower your brand’s credibility.

Now is Not the Time to Shake Things Up!

Just as people know your brand as one of quality, they’ve come to recognize your emails in a certain way as well. If you want to shake things up — such as sending email from a new domain name or even a new user (joe@example.com versus support@example.com), this will often trigger deliverability processes to block your email, since you’ll have no history with the new domain name, and services like Gmail as well as ISP emails don’t have any way to gauge if what you’re sending is authentic or if should be labeled as spam.

In other words, you’ll have to build up your reputation as a sender all over again. If you need to change things for branding purposes, prune inactive emails from your lists and position it in such a way as to remind people of your brand messaging but with a fresh new outlook or something that seems familiar to them, but still gives you creative leeway to stretch your brand wings a bit.

Concentrate on Your Active, Attentive Subscribers

It can be a challenge to stay relevant and stay front-of-mind with your subscribers, especially over the holidays. But by concentrating on those users that look forward to hearing from you, that are loyal customers and receptive to your marketing and offers, you can grow your “clout” as a reputable sender throughout the holidays and beyond. It may not be obvious but nurturing active subscribers to your email campaigns is one key aspect in better customer retention.

And if you need help improving your email deliverability, for the holidays and beyond, why not reach out to our senior advertising professionals here at Workdom today? With our years of experience helping brands large and small capitalize on the best email marketing practices, we are uniquely suited to help you improve deliverability rates and get your messages noticed first in users’ inboxes.

Originally published at https://www.workdom.io on December 11, 2020.