Best practices for holiday sending

Overview

Sending close to and on holidays like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day, and other sales oriented holidays requires careful attention and targeting. Read on to learn Sendlane's best practices for sending during holidays, and make sure to check out Sendlane's marketing experts' guide to BFCM!

In this guide

• Prepare content in advance
• Use segments to target sends
• Use automations to update contact profiles

Prepare content in advance

Carefully constructing content in advance of holidays can help ensure your calls to action lead to as many happy customers as possible. Check out the following guides to preparing content for smooth holiday sending:

• Sendlane's Email Builder
• Collect SMS consent via Automation or Campaign emails or opt-in keyword
• SMS content best practices
• How to Create Evergreen Content to Warm Up Customers
• 11 SMS Examples to Sell More This Holiday Season
  
• How to Create Personalized Emails for eCommerce

Send at "odd" times

This is a best practice that can serve you well all year long, and it's one most senders forget about. 

When you schedule sends, it's natural to select an on-the-hour time, like 9 AM or 2 PM. The problem is that this is everyone else's natural thought process, too, which means a lot of emails are trying to get out at the same time.

While sending at "odd" times like 9:12 AM instead of 9 AM can't guarantee fast delivery, it also can't hurt, and on high-volume days, it can make a difference.

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Use segments to target sends

Segmentation is critical for holiday sending because, on these higher volume sending days, inbox providers are working overtime to protect their users' inboxes from unwanted email.

Read our guide to advanced segmentation and create the suggested Segments if you haven't already, and consider the following practices:

• Offer your Segment of all time non-purchasers a special offer
• Target new subscribers who are engaged with your content but haven't yet made a purchase by creating a Segment like the following:
  • Subscription date is during the timeframe that makes up the current holiday season, AND
  • Clicked > Recent > X > Days, OR
  • Opened > Recent > X > Days, AND
  • eCommerce integration > Store > order > Fulfilled (or the order status your store uses to indicate a completed order) > Does Not Exist

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Use automations to update contact profiles

Holiday activity can be a valuable predictor of future behavior, and Automations are here to help you add this data to Contact profiles.

Use the Update Contact Profile action in an Automation to add a Tag with purchase preferences to the profiles of Contacts who purchase during your holiday season.

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