There's a popular saying: "All's well that ends well." This probably rings especially true if you're an email marketer. With the new year looming in the distance, now's a good time to sit down and plan your annual year-end email campaign.

But you might be asking, "What's an annual year-end campaign?"

Well, it's probably the last bit of communication that you initiate from your side before welcoming the new season of email marketing. This is one email campaign where you need to be careful on quite a few fronts.

Whether it's the content, timeliness, contacts, or the intent, these emails are important. They play a crucial role in slowly decreasing the intensity of communication that picks up during the holiday season while keeping the brand relevant to the contacts during the post-holiday period. Here are some tips to consider before beginning your annual year-end campaigns.

The right  audience 

In this case, your audience consists of the contacts in your mailing lists, of which you should be completely aware.  However, you have an edge if you've already been practicing email marketing during the holiday season, as that will have given you the metrics to gauge which contacts in your mailing list are active.

As an email marketer, if you possess this knowledge, then you shouldn't engage with other contacts or break the trend with this annual email campaign. These already-engaged contacts will be well aware of the holiday season campaign you've been running for some time now. They'll therefore expect to receive year-ending bonus content filled with gratitude for their support and incentives for the future.

Features that can help you in reaching the right audience:

• Reports (both individual and campaign level)
• Segmentation
• Topics

Thoughtful content  

The content for these email campaigns should always include two primary aspects:

- Being thankful to the contacts

- Providing them with an incentive for the upcoming year

Your content should be short and precise. Begin with a word or two regarding the current year and the visions you've achieved, then you can segue into talking about your plans for the next year so that you can afford busy shoppers some respite. Finally, you can attain some closure by thanking them for their support and hoping to keep the relationship alive for the upcoming year.

Features that can help you create thoughtful content:

• Template editor (both html and plain text versions)
• Campaign Policy feature in the settings section - Helps you achieve a narrative that's accepted by the entire brand.

 Timely emails 

An untimely email is a wasted email. Unfortunately, that really is true for email marketers almost all the time. Landing in your contacts' inboxes at the right time can be tricky, especially during the holiday season, thanks to two factors: your contacts' differing engagement times and the sharp increase in the number of emails they receive from every other sender during this period.

Your holiday email marketing strategy again plays a significant role here, as your emails prior to this one (your annual email campaign) should already have provided you with your contacts' prime engagement time. That's it; just put these metrics into account and send out your campaigns when there's a greater possibility that they'll be opened and read by your contacts.

Be sure to put important actionable elements in your email content if you don't want to depend completely on open rates.

Features that can help you optimize send times:

• Send time optimization - This will help you understand when your contacts are most likely to engage.
  
• Reports - Engagement-based metrics help you determine the best time to send out campaigns.