3 Data‑Driven Holiday Email Strategies to Inspire Success This Season

When it comes to email, everyone knows that personalization matters. That’s probably why email marketers have relied on data from every source under the sun to learn exactly what audiences are looking for for years.

But as consumers grow more and more wary of not only where brands are collecting all this data but also how that data is being used, companies like Apple that have traditionally been considered arbiters of consumer privacy are being forced to evolve. Data-driven holiday email marketing strategies will require businesses everywhere to not only rethink their relationship with customers and the data they share, but offer new (and greater) ways to control and protect the personal info they share.

That said, greater data privacy protections doesn’t mean the end of personalization where your data-driven holiday email strategies are concerned. In fact, today’s ever-changing email marketing landscape has the potential to offer your brand more ways to build customer loyalty and good will than ever before — especially if you find a way to enhance your audience’s holiday celebrations and feelings of joy.

It’s no secret that these next few months will bring your highest levels of online traffic and engagement all year. And all of those shoppers — whether they’re visiting your site for the very first time or every day — are giving you valuable insight with every click, purchase, page view, and product review. Insight that contains every clue you need to create exciting, personalized, and data-driven email marketing strategies guaranteed to drive conversions, grow revenue, and build the foundation for long-term customer relationships.

As long as you keep these three things in mind, of course.

Opens are so last year. This holiday season, engagement is in-style.

Apple’s recent Mail Privacy Protection update is causing quite a stir for email marketers who use open rates as their main success metric. Among several other changes that came with iOS 15, these new data-focused features are “designed to protect user privacy.” Meaning that personally identifiable information email senders are used to receiving whenever someone opens their message through Apple Mail — IP address, location, time of open, etc. — will no longer be available. At least not in any reliable, accurate, or usable manner moving forward.

However, these data privacy measures aren’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, they might just be the wake-up call many email marketers needed. For many companies Apple Mail Privacy Protection is a gift masquerading as a problem.

While open rates are still an important benchmark to consider in Q4, it shouldn’t be the only email marketing metric your data-driven holiday email strategies should prioritize.This year, generating engagement and building loyalty by creating digital interactions that make it easy to shop is ultimately much more important than simply getting someone to open your message.

Incorporating a third-party platform like Spendigo into your holiday-themed email campaigns is one of the simplest tactics to implement. Plus, by doing so you allow subscribers to browse products, use loyalty points, and even make purchases right from their inbox.

Connecting your customers’ live loyalty program points, totals, and status with your ecommerce app of choice makes it incredibly easy for customers to redeem rewards or exclusive discounts. And making it easier to redeem those offers, no matter where customers are shopping this holiday season, almost always means an instant boost in audience engagement and revenue.

Let your satisfied customers speak for themselves — and your brand

Let’s face it: holiday shopping can be stressful. Especially when most consumers’ inboxes are absolutely packed with brands offering similar products, sales, and promotions. One way to break through the oft-crowded, confusing barrage of messaging is to offer your subscribers honest feedback from satisfied customers. According to a recent study from Stackla, 80% of shoppers trust user-generated content (UGC) when making purchase decisions.

Combining email personalization and the power of first-party data (data consumers freely share with brands) with UGC immediately elevates the customer experience. By providing your customers with honest feedback for products coming from like-minded perspectives, you can use data collected from abandoned cart information, previous email clicks, or items browsed coupled with personalized product reviews from happy customers to make your holiday messages feel less like marketing-speak and a lot more like recommendations from a trusted friend.

For marketers that really want to see results from their data-driven holiday email strategies, adding live rankings and recommendations is a great way to take personalization and UGC to the next level. These emails go beyond offering personalized product reviews by connecting the products users have recently browsed with user content and reviews in real-time, a change that’s guaranteed to drive future bookings and revenue growth.

Generate excitement with dynamic content in your data-driven holiday email strategies

Creating opportunities for engagement and conversion is all about getting subscribers excited enough to take action. Offering timely emails about your latest events, offers, and new products is an important way to keep data-driven holiday email strategies feeling fresh. That’s where dynamic content comes into play.

Simply put, dynamic content is an email that changes based on cues from users. Dynamic emails can be based on a number of factors, from adapting messaging based on which parts of a website an individual subscriber has engaged with or tailoring offers based on past purchase data to driving engagement based on recently browsed product categories. Driving a sense of urgency using up-to-the-minute dynamic content is one of the best ways to grow revenue by making all your emails feel like one-of-a-kind offers.