Here’s to Keeping Your Holiday Delivery Merry and Bright

As an email marketer, you may be rubbing your hands together with glee for the expectation of the holiday season: new subscribers, big boosts in metrics, and lots of healthy conversions.

You may even be tempted to find excuses to send even more emails than you usually do during the gift-buying, gift-giving season. However, if you’re not careful, an over-abundance of email could do more harm than good.

I Can Send More, Right?

If read up on ReturnPath’s recent Inbox Benchmark report. In that study, the deliverability expert’s stats say email was more likely to reach the inbox during the 2013 holiday season. Based on that data, shouldn’t we all be sending more holiday email campaigns?

Not exactly. You have to look at what happened in the deliverability space last year. There were a number of factors contributing to slightly higher inbox placement across the industry, including the uptick in mobile opens and the additional volume of email from large, reputable national brands.

Here’s a Better Idea

If you’re not a large, reputable national brand, it’s important to remember these industry-wide numbers don’t mean much for you. Instead, worry about if your email is or isn’t reaching the inbox. You should continue to test your content and frequency, send to your most loyal and engaged subscribers. Most importantly, you should ask your audience if they’re okay with you increasing the frequency of your sends before you move forward. This can be done through a survey in your regular email campaigns.

And don’t underestimate the power of following delivery best practices. If you aren’t familiar with those, we’ve got experts for that. In fact, take a listen to a recent Marketing Over Coffee podcast where our Director of Deliverability Brad Gurley talks about the most popular deliverability topics:

• Deliverability 101


• Interactivity 101


• How to resolve black list issues


• The two most common mistakes made by email marketers when it comes to delivery.


• How reputation scoring works


• Good benchmarks for spam reporting


• When to know if third-party deliverability tools are a requirement

Here’s to Keeping Your Holiday Delivery Merry and Bright