Email marketing during the holidays: strategies for success

Inboxes bursting at the seams

These bulging end-of-year inboxes have a downside. For example, December is - paradoxically - the month with the lowest email engagement. Carefully constructed email strategies and proven optimal send times are suddenly worthless during November and December. The festive period is the time for fewer opens and clicks and more unsubscribes than at any other time of the year. It’s safe to say that it's no easy feat reaching your target audience by email at all in the festive period, let alone to wish them happy holidays.

Have you got that email with Christmas baubles drafted, designed, proofed and ready to send? Time to check whether it meets two crucial conditions for a successful end-of-year email: timing and content.

1. Timing: identify the perfect time to send

Let’s not beat about the bush: if you work in B2C and retail and you still haven’t scheduled your December mailings, you're way too late. After all, successful delivery presupposes that your stock and logistics requirements are all in order and ready to spring into action. Apart from that, it is worth fine-tuning the concept, the copy and the of the end-of-year email planning carefully.

Dive into your stats

Unfortunately, there is no universal goldilocks zone for sending emails. Determine what works best for your recipients by diving into your own metrics. When did you send your festive emails last year? When did the most recipients open and click? And what about in previous years? Analyse your data and update your strategy with it every year.

HubSpot research shows that on average, 6% more people open emails in the week before Christmas. From Christmas Eve, that open rate, not entirely unexpectedly, plunges by 42%. On Christmas Day, you shouldn't expect someone to abandon the festivities to check their emails: up to 72% fewer emails are opened. And open rates remain very low in the days after Christmas.
Around the end of the year, hardly anyone is waiting for an email: on 31 December, 58% fewer people check their emails, on New Year's Day this is 62% less. According to the research, it’s only in the first (working) days after the New Year that we see a huge open rate peak.

So if you want to reach customers by email during the festive season, it is clearly best to do it one week before 25 December, or in the first week of January.

Of course, it is best to compare your own statistics and customer data with these findings. We are here to help you with it.

Need help? Our experts are happy to help.

"So if you want to reach customers by email during the festive season, it is clearly best to do it one week before 25 December, or in the first week of January. "

Outside of office hours

Your data and research will help you determine the right time. You don't have to limit yourself to thinking within office hours. It’s possible that sending during the evening will perform very well. Don't hesitate, experiment to your heart's content and use your experience and data next year.

And one last tip when it comes to timing: January is traditionally the month with the lowest mail volume. It might be worth wishing your recipients a Happy New Year around the 5th of January.

2. Content: do's and don'ts

It should be obvious by now that in this time of jam-packed mailboxes and end-of-year madness, you really have to pull out all the stops. Many companies make the mistake of sending an email that only consists of an image during the festive season, nothing more than a digital Christmas card. However, many email programmes, with Outlook leading the way, do not automatically download images by default. As a result, it is highly possible that your beautiful email will arrive as nothing more than a red cross.

Standing out is key now. So find a creative way to reach your target audience. Send interactive content that requires your recipients to do something before they can see your special festive message. Or go for creative, festive or crazy gif in the email text to put an otherwise boring mailbox in the festive mood. With AI, personalisation and a creative approach is more accessible than ever before.

Resist the Santa hats

It is also tempting to get jolly with photos of staff wearing Santa hats or to present an anthology of everything your organisation has achieved over the past year. But is that what your recipients are waiting for? Our advice is to avoid the clichés and send your target audience content that they can use.

A personalised infographic with useful information that is visually distinctive. Show your user or customer what they have achieved or experienced in the past year. For example, Fitbit sends an infographic to their customers with interesting personal data: the number of steps they took, how many kilometres they travelled in total, the friends who followed them, etc. Or think about something like the annual Spotify Wrapped emails, which summarise your listening behaviour over the past year.

Playing with game elements in email

But if you really want to stand out during the holidays: make sure you have an email that triggers your reader’s playful spirit. Gamification, the integration of game elements into your campaigns, is a powerful tool to increase engagement: the possibility of winning or discovering something creates a sense of fun and excitement and stimulates, among other things, the release of dopamine in the brain. This happiness hormone prompts people to repeatedly engage in playful activities.

Here are three inspiring ideas to get you started:

Discount Roulette: Invite your subscribers to spin a virtual wheel to access different discounts.
Advent calendar: a new offer or small prize every day that recipients can access by clicking on the email.
Poll and quiz: Invite your audience to participate in a quiz or survey with a chance to win prizes or exclusive discounts.

With these playful elements, you can create a unique and interactive experience that your target audience is sure to appreciate.

Make use of GIF

During the holiday season, GIF marketing can really make your emails stand out. GIFs grab attention quickly, increase engagement, and convey your message in a vivid way. Think of a festive animation that highlights your end-of-year offer, or a playful GIF that brings your newsletter to life. One great thing is that most email clients support GIFs, making them display correctly on both desktop and mobile devices. Just be sure to keep the GIF's file size under 800KB to avoid loading delays and ensure smooth playback. GIFs give your campaign a personal and visually appealing touch, which ensures more interaction and higher conversions. Add a playful and festive atmosphere to your emails, and stand out from the competition with well-placed GIFs.

Below is an example of an animated GIF we've used in an end-of-year mailing for our client Carglass:

carglass_santa_gif — Animated gif that we've created for a Carglass mailing

Or curate special content

Nothing to give away? No personal annual overviews to generate? No idea how to squeeze an infographic out of your offer? Then give content curation a try: collect the best articles you've published over the past year or gather must-reads about trends and challenges in your field you can summarise and package them in a celebratory email. Because with a reader's digest, your recipients get insights that they can put to good use. And we’re sure they're more interested in that than baubles or snowmen.

3. Don't forget the basics

Even if you send an end-of-year email with best wishes to your customers, stakeholders and relations, it is worthwhile keeping the basic principles of a successful email campaign in mind:

Segmentation

Do you know your audience? Have you already segmented your mailing list with customer data according to those different segments? You can create segments based on any known field in the email marketing tool. Both with fields that you assign to the contact yourself and with fields that are filled in by the tool itself. It is therefore important to think carefully in advance about which fields you wish to include with the import, the link to the website, etc. The quiet days at the end of the year are a great moment to take a critical look at your mailing lists.

Personalisation

Are you sending everyone the same message in the same package? Or do customers from different segmentations receive New Year's greetings that are more in line with what you want to achieve over the next year. Personalisation is not only possible in your email salutation. You can also have your recipient’s name in the subject line. In addition, you can insert several details into the copy of the email that the recipient shared with you. A personalised message has much more impact and creates more goodwill. So it's a good idea to come up with a creative concept and then shape it according to:

The products or services that a customer purchases
The challenges they face next year
The message that will trigger them more
...

To AI or not to AI

Are you going to use artificial intelligence for the creation, personalisation and execution of your email campaigns? Then use AI as a tool and make sure that everything still benefits from human supervision. AI can help personalise messages at scale, but human review is still essential to ensure that content remains relevant and appropriate.

"With AI, personalisation and a creative approach is more accessible than ever before. "

Mobile optimisation

Long before you click 'send' you should check how your email looks on smartphones. According to various studies and reports from 2023, the mobile open rate in Europe is typically between 50% and 70%. This means that more than half of emails are opened on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Of course, this percentage can fluctuate depending on the specific circumstances of the mailing and the target audience. Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly by using responsive designs and writing short, scannable content.

Subject and preview can make or break your email campaign

Especially during the festive season, a strong subject line and preview text are key determining factors as to whether your email will be opened or ignored amidst a plethora of promotional messages. More than 47% of recipients open emails based solely on the subject line, while 69% mark emails as spam for the same reason. Subject lines that suggest urgency and exclusivity will make your email stand out and increase engagement and conversions. So make sure you have an attractive subject line and don't shy away from evoking festive cheer.

A/B test your subject

Running A/B tests can help you to identify which version of your email performs best. Test different subject lines, content, images, and CTAs to see what resonates best with your audience. Every email tool offers this functionality, so take advantage of it to optimise your email campaigns.

Monitor with care

Your CTOR (click-to-open-rate) is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens. If your email has 150 clicks and has been opened 200 times, divide 150 by 200 and multiply it by 100 to get a percentage: in this case, the click-to-open rate is 75%. But if you look at the data, keep in mind that a lot of email clients are now blocking data collection, which will distort your open rates. So take your data with a pinch of salt and look for trends instead of hard data.

Email marketing is not a relic of a bygone age. On the contrary: it’s making a serious comeback. The impact of a good email campaign should not be underestimated: it can bring a lot of valuable conversions and support the other elements within your marketing strategy. If you want to know more, download the white paper.

Find out more about the importance of email creation

Our specialists recently published an exciting white paper that covers how email can support your digital growth, and we hosted a successful email marketing event about the importance of a strong strategy, optimising and automating your campaigns, and the benefits that interactive mailings can bring you.
Did you miss it? You can download the presentations and sign up for our newsletter, it’s the best way to keep up to date with our webinar and event calendar.

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Conclusion

As long as you make sure your content is relevant to your recipients, your inbox engagement metrics will be fine. Even in December.

Do you want to create campaigns with impact, or are you considering getting started with emailing marketing next year? Would you like advice from an expert about your email strategy for the coming year, or would you like a content creator to advise you on how to create the most effective email campaigns? Feel free to send us an email. Our email experts are looking forward to working with you.

"The quiet days at the end of the year are a great moment to take a critical look at your mailing lists."

The ultimate end-of-year guide

Cyber week and the end-of-year are approaching fast. There's still a lot of great opportunities to boost your sales. This guide, will help you fine-tune your communication and advertising strategy so that you can grab your target audience's attention and keep it. We will teach you how to sell through external platforms and marketplaces like Bol.com and Amazon, and how to roll out the digital red carpet for your customers.

Download our end-of-year guide