Time to start the two month countdown! With the holiday season just around the corner, it’s time to think about your plans for messaging your users. You want to make the holiday experience easy for your subscribers and for yourself. Below are a few tips we suggest you follow as the holidays approach:

1. Set up recurring campaigns. This will save you time best served for other things, like imbibing in your Great Aunt Martha’s Famous Eggnog! Using Sailthru’s Zephyr language in conjunction with the Horizon behavioral targeting, you can send a dynamic email without having to make any changes to your email templates. Just think of all that time you’ll save…pass the ‘nog!

2. If using Horizon, make sure all your content  is tagged, accurate, and up to date for the best holiday recommendations. Once a user is in holiday shopping mode, they’re more inclined to continue to purchase, so make it easier for them to stuff their stockings!

3. A/B test your holiday campaigns now so you can send your better-performing campaign closer to the holidays to maximize your ROI.

4. If you haven’t implemented our purchase API yet, do so now. You can use the purchase API to track revenue that was generated from your holiday campaigns. Using that purchase data, you then can determine what strategies were more successful this season than others, also helping when pushing for next year’s budgets.

5. Be sure to include a text-only version for your campaigns. Mobile devices will render these in the preview of an email inbox. And since retailers are increasing the frequency of sends to announce sales & special incentives, it’s all-the-more important to stand out from the rest. Be bold. Deliver clever content. Creativity helps bring attention to these deals.

6. Everyone likes to be appreciated. Send a simple “Happy Holidays” email to your users to let them know how much you value them!  After all, ‘tis the season of giving!