Holiday email tips: Sending targeted emails

We hope you're following our four-tip series on holiday-based ecommerce email marketing and the previous instalment was helpful. Today's tip will help you learn how to send emails that stand out in your recipients' inbox and improve engagement.

Before discussing the tip, let's understand why targeted emails are important.

Targeted emails

It simply means sending the right content to the right people. Holiday season or not, sending targeted emails boosts your bottom line in many ways.

1. Increased engagement and inbox placement

Your recipients start feeling that the emails are uniquely tailored to them. This increases the likelihood of opening your emails long-term, which, in turn, improves your overall email deliverability (read: inbox placement).

Inbox Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and more consider your engagement patterns as one of the means to take the spam-or-inbox decision. If your recipients are positively responding to your email (open, link clicks), it does a world of good to your email deliverability.

2. Reduced opt-outs and inactivity

Generally, people subscribe to your emails for different reasons: some want updates and deals, and some want to improve their product knowledge. Therefore, it's crucial to segment your recipients based on their sensibilities, behavior patterns, and more and create relevant content. If not, they might unsubscribe from your emails once for all.

Over and above, identifying your active contacts is a major form of segmentation in itself. If you send emails to contacts that haven't engaged with your emails for a very long time, it sends a bad signal to the ISPs that your mailing lists are unhealthy. This, in turn, affects your email deliverability. Sending irrelevant emails is one of the many reasons why a contact turns inactive.

Tip: Creating segments of your mailing list

When you tightly integrate your store with your email marketing platform, the latter categorizes the former's data into easily accessible segments.

Ecommerce-based segmentation

For example: When Zoho Campaigns is integrated with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Zoho Commerce, there are seven pre-built segments you can make use of:

1. Items purchased

2. Items not purchased

3. Average amount spent

4. Average amount spent per order

5. Date of the last order

6. Total number of orders

7. Total amount spent

Let's take the date-of-the-last-order segment for instance and assume the following as the criteria: last ordered date is after November 20, 2020.

The common discount-sale email you're likely sending to your customers now can be tailored to this segment like, "Hey! To ensure you have a lot more to cherish this holidays on the back of our association, we're offering a 30% discount on your next two orders."

Note: A conventional profile-information-based segmentation is also possible, provided you have them stored in your mailing lists. (For example, gender.)

Tip for holiday email marketing

We hope this helped! Stay tuned as we ideate our final tip of this holiday email marketing series.

Regards,

Aravindhan S