BlogmyQuery – BMQ

The Holiday season is the most competitive time of the year. Every brand tries to get the maximum out of their email campaigns during these busy days. As the email volume increases, you have to invest extra time and effort to create impactful campaigns that convert. 

For better understanding, we have divided the topic into five distinct subheadings, namely content, design and development, deliverability, the X-factor, and things to avoid. 

Let’s discuss each one of them in further detail:

1. Content

As platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are getting more popular, your subscribers expect video content and visually rich emails in their inboxes. The Holiday season is a good time to experiment with these rich media elements and see how they work for your business. 

It is a good idea to check the competitors and derive some inspiration from their strategy. Track the past purchases and browsing history of your subscribers to target them with relevant content. 

Add social proof in your marketing emails as well as automated emails. Highlight your best-sellers, top-rated products, product testimonials, and company-centric testimonials in your Holiday emails. It will build confidence and encourage the users to purchase from you, especially during the season of giving. 

Besides promoting your discount offers, let the customers know how your product makes lives easier for them. Inform them about free shipping, easy returns, and gift wrapping policy. 

2. Design and development

More than 50% of online sales take place through mobile devices. But, that does not imply that you overlook desktops. You must design your email campaigns in such a way that it renders well across all devices and email clients.    

Incorporate Holiday elements in your email campaigns. Use bright colors like red, blue, and white to match the festive vibes. Just make sure that you keep an eye on the file sizes. Avoid using images over 1 MB to maintain optimum loading time and engagement rate.  

If you have a large subscriber base accessing emails through Gmail and an ESP supporting AMP technology, send out interactive AMP emails that work as a mailable microsite. You can also send out GIFs to make your emails visually aesthetic. 

An important design aspect is accessibility. Use suitable color contrast so that the important elements stand out. When using visuals, keep away from too flashy animations or GIFs flashing between 2 to 55 Hz as it can aggravate photosensitive epilepsy. Also, create Dark Mode compatible emails as most of your subscribers are accessing emails in dark mode settings. 

3. Deliverability

Clean the subscriber list before sending out Holiday email campaigns to ensure a good deliverability rate during the peak season. Warm up your domain at least two months prior to the Holidays. If needed, consult a reliable deliverability partner who can guide you through the process. 

You can also consider investing in an exclusive subdomain for the Holiday season. As send volumes are expected to reach an astronomical figure during the Holidays, a new subdomain would keep you away from the radar of ESPs and ISPs. 

Change the segmentation criteria to warrant proper data hygiene. Refrain from increasing the sending frequency overnight and send emails to active subscribers only. Many brands employ blast email campaigns during the Holiday season. That can be detrimental to your email deliverability and the sender’s reputation. 

4. The X-factor

The holiday season is a good time to share your brand story and stand out from your competitors. Let your customers know how your products stand out from the pack. Target them with language and visuals that they can relate to. If needed, put the automated emails on hold or modify the trigger events. Your subscribers behave differently during the Holiday season. Recognize this aspect and adapt to your customer needs matching the Holiday season. 

5. Things to avoid

• Don’t resend your Holiday emails to non-openers automatically. With Apple’s MPP, open rates might be tracked inaccurately and redundant communications are the last thing your subscribers want to receive. 
• Don’t wait too long before planning the Holiday email strategy. Early fall is a good time to start conceptualizing your email campaigns. 
• Don’t miss out on sharing important information like order processing and shipping deadlines in the Holiday emails. 
• Don’t send text-heavy emails as people will be scanning through their emails instead of reading. 
• Don’t carry on with automated emails that include a wall of text. Revamp your automation strategy to align with the Holiday mood. For example: Include special sign-up offers to welcome the subscribers during the Holiday season. The Holiday season is perfect to re-engage the users and inspire them to buy from you again. 

Conclusion

Email Uplers got in touch with 10 industry stalwarts to understand how to slay your Holiday email game. To get actionable tips from the experts, head to the insightful infographic.

The post Holiday Email Campaigns: How to Rise Above the Chaos in the Inbox appeared first on noupe.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a technically challenging software to use. You need to be a jack of multiple trades to use it to its maximum potential. You need to visualize intricate workflows clearly, accurately score and grade the leads, create effective segmentation and personalization strategies, and keep testing at regular intervals. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You need to handle so many other things to implement marketing automation using SFMC. 

Here are some of the best practices that will allow you to stay ahead of the curve while using SFMC:

1. Take baby steps

Implementing large, complex processes from the get-go can be overwhelming for an average marketer. So, you must take baby steps and start with the activities that bring the biggest results through the smallest effort. At the outset, automate the repetitive tasks in the workflow. Choose low-effort, low-risk, and high-returns tasks that will not hamper your ongoing operations. 

2. Understand the flow thoroughly

Try to understand the entire process rather than automating any individual point within the process. Document and map the complete workflow. Then, identify the opportunities for automation. This will help ensure that you can build effective solutions that perfectly match the existing processes. It will also help you meet the program goals. 

3. Avoid giving in to the temptation to try out advanced features

Salesforce Marketing Cloud keeps adding new functionalities in the tool every now and then. For example: It is quite likely that Einstein Send Time Optimization will eliminate send times based on anecdotal logic instead of data. 

While it can be tempting to be the early adopters and start using them right away, it is advisable to focus on the current goals and processes you have chalked out. It might also lead to spoiling the entire project and cost you exorbitantly. Therefore, the best bet is to stay focused on the existing features and task at hand. You can always try out the new features after successful completion of that project. 

4. Use journey settings as business requirements

Always consult the business stakeholders and get them to review the settings before activation. For instance: Discuss with the decision makers how they want to configure contact entry mode — No re-entry, re-entry anytime, or re-entry only after exiting. 

5. Employ watertight customer segmentation strategies

Define a powerful customer segmentation strategy by finding answers to questions like:

1. Most significant actions to identify how a customer engages with your brand
2. Actions or behavior that qualify someone as an engaged customer
3. Opportunities to upsell to “somewhat” engaged customer or get them excited about a new feature or product launch

After identifying the segments, you must find the data within your organization or get together with an analytics team to plan the data architecture strategy by defining the customer aggregations. 

Take into consideration whether you will be able to find a resource with SQL skills while defining the data strategy. Such resources can create custom segments inside the Marketing Cloud with the data. It is advisable to have access to this skill set. However, there are drag and drop tools such as DESelect using which users without SQL skills can also execute complex segmentations. 

6. Carry out IP warming

If you are a new user looking forward to sending more than 100k emails per month, carry out IP warming to establish a favorable sender reputation. 

Here’s how to carry out IP warming correctly:

7. Authenticate your email domain (DNS records)

Email authentication protects your account and prevents your emails from being marked as spam and actually reaching your recipient’s inbox. Learn more about Email Hygiene Best Practices here.

8. Utilize the power of Content Detective

Content Detective is a tool within SFMC Email Studio that allows you to keep the messages out of the subscriber’s spam folders. They recognize phrases that can trigger the spam filters and help in curbing deliverability issues. 

9. Take help of Subscriber Preview 

Subscriber Preview allows you to steer clear of any personalization blunders in email. Imagine someone receiving an email saying “Hey {Fname}”. With the help of the Subscriber Preview feature, you can check how an email will look like for a particular subscriber. As a best practice, identify the testing personas to make sure that your personalization is on point. You can do this through live or real subscriber data or with the help of ‘dummy’ test data that cover all the scenarios. 

10. Use Journey Builder’s test feature

The test mode along with a data extension enables you to view the simulated paths through the customer’s journey without the need to send messages to them or affecting tracking or reporting. It emulates random and decision split activities while ignoring wait times and contact entry settings. You will be able to get an exact view of the entire journey workflow without waiting. Once the test is complete, you will see the contact’s expected path on the journey canvas. This feature goes a long way in saving time. You no longer need to wait for 2-3 weeks to figure out whether it is configured correctly. 

11. Invest in a deliverability monitoring tool

A deliverability monitoring tool like Inbox Monster allows you to carry out unlimited inbox placement tests and elaborate deliverability analytics. It can be easily integrated with SFMC and you will get a complete suite of professional services and collaboration tools. It will also help you avoid getting blacklisted. Such tools make sure that you abide by the email sending best practices and stay away from spam traps.

12. Take the minimalistic approach

The key is to keep even the most advanced campaigns simple. With the help of Journey Builder, you can create elaborate multi-step campaigns that have several activities on the canvas. However, it is recommended that you keep it simple for the best functionality. Just because a feature exists does not mean you have to use it. When you create a complex campaign, you will find it tough to manage, maintain, and debug it. So, the bottom line is to create it as minimalistic as possible. Follow the “crawl, walk, run” approach and gradually advance to marketing automation maturity. 

13. Always follow the generic best practices

Just because you are using a powerful and advanced tool like SFMC, you cannot do away with the best practices. You have to create engaging content, keep it brief and specific, and create actionable CTAs that immediately draw attention. Also, keep the image to text ratio at 20:80 to avoid any deliverability issues. 

Wrapping Up

SFMC is a robust marketing automation tool that can open up new conversion opportunities and drive faster business growth, if used correctly. Through these tips, you will surely be able to propel sales and achieve unmatched results from your campaigns. 

For more insights, visit the insightful infographic created by the folks at Email Uplers: Salesforce Marketing Automation best practices from 11 global SFMC experts

The post SFMC Automation Best Practices to Beat the Competitive Bottleneck in Email Marketing appeared first on noupe.