Email Deliverability Tips for the Holiday Season

Jan Schapmans

November 18, 2020

During and leading up to the holiday season, people’s inboxes are bombarded with a tremendous amount of marketing emails. This year, we can expect an even larger amount of email marketing campaigns, as consumers around the world have shifted to more of a digital and online approach to shopping.

How can you make sure your company’s emails stand out from the crowd and get your customers’ attention? Deliverability is one critical key. Email deliverability is the measure of how many messages actually reach the inboxes of intended recipients with a valid email address. Deliverability is not to be confused with similar-sounding metrics such as delivery rate or delivered rate. These stats merely indicate that messages have been sent successfully or reached the target server without bouncing, but they still may be filtered as spam.

Deliverability has become an increasingly complex issue in recent years. It’s no longer just about sender reputation. Today, a multitude of factors determine whether or not your messages enjoy safe passage to recipients’ inboxes. Deliverability is a major subject at Marigold Engage, because it has a direct impact on our activity and that of our customers. That’s why we employ a strong in-house email deliverability team globally, with members in Belgium, U.K., France, Italy, Spain, and the U.S. – each concentrating on the email deliverability nuances to their particular country or region.

We recognize that email deliverability is both an art and a science, with its success dependent on people and technology. At Selligent, we have both: strong industry experts and a proprietary email sending infrastructure, optimized for deliverability success. As a trusted partner with decades of experience in deliverability, we provide services to our clients in order to help them incorporate best practices and approaches to help build reputation rapidly; offer proactive monitoring over deliverability performance and sender score; offer real-time detailed deliverability reporting; and provide mediation where required in the event that the brand finds themselves blacklisted.

But back to the issue at hand: deliverability for the holiday season. We just updated our Deliverability Tips for the Holidays, a popular resource in years’ past, to help you ensure your customers receive and engage with your emails during this most critical time of year. This free guide features valuable advice to keep your deliverability levels healthy this season. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the tips.

Avoid Infrastructure Changes: Try to avoid changes to your infrastructure one or two months prior to the sales period, to maintain the reputation you’ve already built up.
Validate Your Target: Keep your user lists clean. Hitting inactive email addresses will lower your reputation and might decrease inbox placement.
Be Consistent: Don’t overdo it! Avoid a sudden increase in the amount of emails your customers normally receive from you. Try to avoid huge spikes in the total number of emails you send on a daily basis, as well. Mailbox providers might flag this as suspicious behavior, which might result in your emails going into the spam folder.
Optimize Content: Personalize your communications even more at this time of year. Use enticing offers and clear call-to-actions to generate more clicks on links in your emails, as this will send a positive message to the mailbox provider and increase your reputation and inbox placement.

Download our Selligent holiday deliverability tip sheet for even more valuable tips to keep your email deliverability levels healthy during the holiday season. And contact us with any questions or challenges you face with your email marketing, during this critical season or at any time of the year.

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