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How Costly Errors Could Ruin Your 2020 Holiday Email Campaigns

 In Uncategorized
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The holidays are upon us. Thanks to a later than normal Amazon Prime Day and the fact that there could be serious shipping delays, retailers are feeling extra pressure this season.

If your brand is focused on eCommerce, there’s good news. Multiple forecasts predict online holiday shopping sales will increase in 2020. Deloitte expects growth between 25% and 30%. Meantime, Salesforce is calling this year “the biggest digital holiday season ever” and predicts 30% of all holiday sales will be made online.

Along with that growth, however, come challenges for online retailers and their holiday marketing efforts. The COVID-19 pandemic gave digital transformation a jumpstart. Now, there’s even more competition for consumers’ attention.

Email marketing plays a pivotal role in driving sales, encouraging customer loyalty, and providing clear communication about online transactions. If you’re using a tool like Zembula to enhance and personalize the customer experience with interactive email content, you’ve already got an edge over the competition. Still, what if just one of your holiday emails has a costly mistake in it?

Your team may have had its holiday emails designed and developed months ago. But even Santa Claus checks his list twice! Here are three undeniable reasons why you should test every holiday email before you hit send.

Limiting your reach

Email marketing can’t do its job unless those emails land in your customers’ inboxes. Let’s be real. No one is perusing their junk folder to see if they happened to miss a promotional email – especially during the hectic holiday season.

What is your team doing to improve email deliverability and stay away from being blacklisted or marked as spam? Testing your emails during pre-deployment alerts you to issues so you can fix them first. A little extra effort means you can feel confident that spam filters will be kind to your holiday emails.

Protecting your brand’s reputation

The holidays are an excellent time to show off your design skills with enhanced visuals and interactive features in your emails. But don’t forget to keep an eye on the basics. Did you miss an unfortunate spelling error? Did someone accidentally include a broken link? Are you meeting accessibility standards? How do your holiday emails render across clients and devices? 

Simple mistakes in emails can cause customers to lose trust in your brand. Plus, you never know when a small misstep could turn into a public relations fiasco. The only way to avoid uncertainty and ensure brand consistency is to test and preview your holiday emails before you send them.

Email on Acid conducted a survey on email errors, which found about 60% of marketers admitted to making at least one mistake in an email over the last year. The report also indicated a higher frequency of sends and larger team size seem to increase the likelihood of those mistakes.

Keep in mind, emails can display quite differently depending on the client or device used to open them. Dark mode complicates things even further. Those darker settings sometimes invert text and background colors. An email that renders incorrectly may seriously mess with branding. Email clients don’t care about your brand guidelines – that’s your job.

Satisfying your customers

Marketers aren’t the only ones feeling stressed over the holidays. Your customers are waiting for their packages with anticipation. Failing to adequately communicate where that package is and when it will arrive leaves people feeling frustrated.

Shipment confirmation and package tracking emails with live updates are an excellent way to earn trust and satisfy your customers. Personalization of transactional emails will definitely improve loyalty and give your brand an edge. Just make sure it’s working correctly. Test and fix your code so the entire email experience is streamlined and seamless.

The bottom line on holiday email errors

The harsh reality about mistakes in holiday email campaigns is that any of the issues mentioned above could directly impact sales attributed to your emails.

Let’s say Gmail puts an important holiday email promotion into spam. If 25% of your list uses Gmail, that’s a significant chunk of lost sales. As another example, imagine you deploy a holiday email campaign to your entire list that links to the wrong landing page. Do you think sending an “Oops email” is going to recoup all those lost sales? That’s doubtful.

We all feel rushed during the holidays – consumers and marketers alike. Take the time to take a breath and test before you send. There’s enough to worry about this time of year. You don’t need to add “send button anxiety” to that list.

When you combine Zembula’s email personalization features with Email on Acid’s email readiness platform, you’re investing in a better customer experience and protecting that investment. Use these tools together for a successful and happy holiday season!

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