It is not holly nor jolly when the beautiful, thoughtful marketing emails you worked so hard on end up in the spam folder.
But it happens far too often for businesses as they try to reach their audiences during high-traffic sending times, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and nearly the entire month of December.
And while November is already upon us, it’s not too late to give your emails the best chance at landing in the inbox. Follow the three steps below to ensure your emails end up in front of your contacts, helping you increase conversions as the year comes to a close.
1. Follow content best practices
It’s tempting to think that loading your email with impressive graphics and tons of great copy is the way to go. The truth is, when it comes to sending holiday emails, less is more.
But this doesn’t mean you can just send anything. Your emails should still be intentionally and strategically designed, and most importantly, filled with the right things. Use the tips below to evaluate your upcoming email campaigns and make sure they won’t catch the attention of spam filters:
- When choosing subject lines, avoid excessive capitalization and punctuation, and stay away from common spam words, such as “urgent,” “free,” “act now,” “limited time” and more.
- Avoid emails that use just one giant graphic to display all your details.
- Use the 60/40 rule: 60% text and 40% images.
- Do not use images over 1MB in size.
- Write concise, to-the-point copy (your audience has a lot of emails to get through, so make sure yours is easy to understand and act on quickly!).
2. Tidy up your list
If you’re sending to an unengaged list, you could be setting yourself up for failure and painting a big, red spam target on your back. Why? Inactive, unengaged contacts can damage your open rates and sender reputation. Plus, these types of contacts are more likely to report you as spam, which is what you want to avoid at all costs.
It’s not worth the risk to send to this part of your audience, so now is the time to go through your small business CRM and remove them from your lists, even if it ends up shrinking your number of recipients.
Remember: A small list of engaged contacts is always better than a large list cluttered with contacts who can damage your sender reputation and get you marked as spam.
We recommend going through your list before any campaign goes out and removing contacts who fulfill the following criteria:
- Inactive subscribers (those who haven’t engaged with your emails in 6-12 months)
- Contacts who mark your emails as spam
- Unsubscribers
- Duplicate email addresses
- Hard bounces (invalid email addresses that return your email)
Keap’s small business CRM includes an email health dashboard that offers detailed insights into your sender reputation, list hygiene, and engagement quality. The dashboard tracks metrics like average engagement, bounce rates, and complaint rates to help you optimize email performance.
3. Follow scheduling best practices
It doesn’t just matter what you’re sending or who you’re sending to. It is also important to consider the frequency and send times of your emails. There are a few main tips to consider as you set out to schedule holiday campaigns:
Choose value over volume: Although it might sound counterintuitive, sending more emails won’t make your marketing efforts more effective or secure you more sales during this time of year. Instead, focus on quality over quantity.
Send at the same days and times you usually do: To get in your audience’s inboxes, you don’t have to start sending at different times and days than normal. In fact, if you want to avoid sounding the spam alarms, it often helps to keep to a similar sending schedule as you do throughout the year.
If you do need to send more emails, do so gradually: Do you absolutely need to send more emails than you normally would? If so, prepare by gradually ramping up the frequency of your emails before the peak holiday season is upon us. This will help you avoid sending spikes that could land you in the spam folder.
Pro tip
If you’re not using every aspect of email automation for your holiday campaigns, now’s the time to start. Make sure your software comes with a user-friendly email builder, quality templates, A/B testing, and robust reporting so you know exactly how each email performs.
Ready, set, send
All of these tips will help bolster your sender reputation, and the benefits of that will last long after the holidays have come and gone. But these are just three of our top tips. If you want to create a more effective email strategy as you head into the new year, use our free resource to maximize your email deliverability.
And one more thing: You’ll need a reliable CRM system with solid email automation features so you can easily craft, schedule and track your campaigns this season. So, if you don’t have one or your current platform doesn’t wow you, check out the best CRM for small businesses and set up a free, no-risk call to discover all of our email automation capabilities, as well as other features to help you reach your goals.
