While holidays spell fun and frolic for some, for others they mean more work. When it comes to email marketers, the holidays are a time to buckle up for increased marketing activity.

Every holiday season tests the nerves of email marketers. Their future can be decided based upon their capability to handle this sudden torrent of buyers. This is when the regular senders try to adapt to changes in the market while seasonal email marketers try to plunge in and tell a story in a short time.

All said and done, you’ll have to make an extra, careful effort to ensure you reap success during the holidays. This blog will discuss methods to make the most of the holiday season and the various avenues you should explore to achieve higher email deliverability and maximum engagement.

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Tim Watson, a leading independent email marketing consultant from Zettasphere, shares his expertise on what kind of email content makes customers happy and stick to a brand. Tim has 14 years of email marketing experience, providing strategic guidance to enhance email campaign performances. He’s also been a twice-elected member of the Email Council at the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) and chair of Email Best Practice hub.

Expert Diaries from Zoho Campaigns connects avid email marketers to the experts in this space, and help them learn some best practices and tips. As #HolidayEmailMarketing is approaching, let’s begin with getting our email content right for acquiring and retaining more customers.

Make your customers happy and deliver value in your email marketing.

Makes sense, right? Customer-centric emails that make them happy recipients of your marketing—it’s a win-win.

Only one problem. What is value to consumers?

The recent Email Addiction Report, carried out by Zettasphere and Email Monday, provides some answers. The report is based on findings from a consumer survey and is freely available.

One question probed the type of content that consumers want, asking “What new email innovations would interest you?”

The top three answers are all related to having more value in the information being provided.

• Product ratings. Valuable information that gives buyers the evidence to support products are worth buying. Social proof.

• Products and offers based on purchase history. Consumers want offers on the things they want to buy. They don’t want offers on irrelevant products. It doesn’t matter how financially enticing an offer is—if the product isn’t wanted, the offer is worth zilch.

• Offers depending on location. With half of emails read on mobile devices, email is a 24/7 connected channel. Automated timely emails are effective and, better still, relevant to the context of the consumer.

The more functional items, such as playing video in the email or buying from an email, are not seen as valuable. Consumers aren’t feeling burdened by the need to click a link to play video or buying on a webpage.

And they don’t seem keen on having a computer sort and delete emails in their inbox. Despite the often-reported email overload, consumers still prefer to be in control. Swiping to delete emails isn’t a burden.

Value ISN’T pure content  

A big trend of recent years has been content marketing. It’s an important part of marketing activity for many brands. The idea is to provide interesting content and consumers will fall in love with you.

A major reason for content marketing is the Google juice that follows. Content is a major part of an SEO play.

But the idea that consumers want only interesting helpful content in emails is wrong.

Don’t expect engaging conversation to magically turn into conversion. You still need to sell, to promote, to ask for the purchase.

And consumers are wanting and expecting this.

A further insight from the Email Addiction Report. Consumers were asked what they expect to receive having signed up for brand emails.

The key point is that consumers sign up expecting offers, savings, and new product information.

Consumers expect to be sold to—that’s one of the reasons for signing up.

Take care to balance pure interest-led content with a good old-fashioned promotion. You’ll be disappointing your customers if you don’t sell to them.

Value is helpful content that helps people buy.

Don’t forget to grab a copy of Email Addiction Report, which is stuffed with research.

Here’s a blog piece by Izabelle Hundrev from G2, a B2B review marketplace for software and services. She specializes in sales, marketing, and real estate content. After earning a degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri, Izabelle moved back to her hometown of Chicago, where she currently resides.

Expert Diaries from Zoho Campaigns connects avid email marketers to the experts in this space, and help them learn some best practices and tips. We’re kickstarting this with some thoughts on how to liven up the your efforts over the next half of this year, helping you perform #SmartEmailMarketing.

Email has proven to be an effective marketing tool for decades. It helps brands drive traffic, nurture leads, and, ultimately, drive sales.

But now more than ever, buyers in the digital age are flooded with messaging across all applicable channels. Marketers face a new challenge: how to cut through the noise.

As we’re rounding up the first half of this year, there’s no time left to waste. Over the next six months, it’s important to look at email marketing through a different lens and focus your efforts on strategies that are proven to deliver measurable results.

An effective email marketing campaign can take many forms (newsletter, nurture campaign, etc.) but should have a strong tactical foundation. In this article, we’ll cover five email marketing strategies to implement that will help you push the envelope and convert more buyers into paying customers.

Audience segmentation  

Email allows you to cast a wide net and connect with your audience in an easy and accessible way. But that doesn’t mean you should target all of your subscribers with the same messaging. Think about it: different people value and care about different things. Someone who just started their own small business has different problems than an executive at a Fortune 500 company. While both of these personas might fit within your target audience, you need to speak to them differently.

This is where audience segmentation comes in. By segmenting your audience into different email lists, you can still reach a lot of people at once, but the messaging will be more relevant to them. How you decide to segment your audience will ultimately be up to you. You can build out email lists based on demographics, level of engagement, or even what stage of the funnel your prospects are in.

Personalization  

The reason audience segmentation is so effective is because it makes an email campaign more personalized. Everybody wants to feel special, and if a brand is able to make you feel like you’re not just another email on their list, you form a stronger connection to that company and their message. 

There are a lot of ways in which marketers can make their email marketing campaigns more personalized. Small touches like switching up the subject line to include the recipient’s name or including a name in the “from” field can make a big difference. Show your subscribers that you value them as individuals and not just for their wallets.

Send-time optimization  

Unless your business only serves a local market, there’s a good chance that your audience doesn’t live in the same time zone. After all, what’s the point of sending a carefully-crafted email if your recipient is asleep when they receive it?

If you check existing research about the best time to send an email, you’ll notice that the results are varied. The truth is there isn’t a universally accepted time that will ensure your email is opened and read. The workaround is that you can test which times work best for your specific audience.

First, start with timezones to make sure you’re hitting your target audience during daytime hours. From there, it’s best to conduct A/B testing to determine which times of the day and days of the week will yield the highest open rates.

Optimize email content for mobile  

The days of having access to email only on a desktop are long gone. Nowadays, most people use their smartphone to keep tabs on just about every aspect of their daily life. If the content of the emails that you’re sending isn’t easily readable on a mobile device, you might have a major problem in your hands. To be frank, it’s just bad email marketing.

Luckily, this is easily preventable. When looking at an email inbox on a smartphone, you’ll notice that each message has three major components: the name of the sender, a subject line, and pre-text. There’s a good chance these elements are the only thing the recipient will see before they decide to click on your email or delete it altogether, so you’ll want to make sure they’re optimized to fit the mobile experience.

Another factor to remember is the size and formatting of your email once it’s opened. If the reader is enticed enough to open your message, you don’t want them to delete it because it’s too difficult to read on their phone. 

Use technology to your advantage  

The final piece of the puzzle is finding the right technology to help you execute. If you pair these email marketing strategies with the correct software tools, you’ll be on your way to converting email subscribers to loyal customers in no time. 

Email marketing software plays a big role in running a successful email campaign. Users can create email lists, make custom templates, and send emails in bulk with the click of a button. In addition to helping you be more efficient, an email marketing solution will provide you with valuable data to track your campaigns and their performance in real time. You can track bounce and click-through rates, as well as the number of users that unsubscribed from your campaign. These insights are valuable when it comes to deciding which campaigns to keep and which ones to get rid of.

Final thoughts  

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to email marketing, but you can do your best to find out what works for your brand and audience. By following these five email marketing strategies, you’ll be able to fully maximize your efforts in no time.