The holiday season is fast approaching and along with it the volume of potential sales volume increase is obvious. The problem is that your business increase doesn’t mean that you have the manpower to handle it, resulting in possible chaos and even loss of customers. If you have been in business for a while, then you know that things get more than a little hectic during the holiday season and as a result your number of complaints may also increase.

To ensure your expected increase of sales during the holiday season, you will automatically create an increased volume of content as well resulting in consumers’ mailboxes being flooded. This in turn would increase the number of complaints once again. Both your inbox placement rates and sender reputation are bound to suffer. You may end up spending more time trying to repair your reputation than winning in the marketplace.

Recent research however told us that this was not the case last season with inbox placement rates holding steady at 85% globally. How did this come to be? The answer is simple. More brands are now optimizing their content to be viewable on mobile devices, owing to the staggering increase of smartphones sales around the world.

The holiday season means more people are on the go more often – as a result they have less time to sit at their workstations and read every mail that floods their inboxes.  They do, however have plenty of time to kill when they are on the go. Sometimes it’s as simple as understanding the seasonal behaviour patterns of consumers in order to be able to develop the right strategies to keep you ahead of the game during the busiest time of the year. If people are accessing mail on the go – make the experience as user friendly as possible – and you will actually get read!

Understanding that 85% of marketing mails are now being read due to a simple addition to the strategy of optimizing content for mobile means that you are still in tough competition so getting your email read is not quite enough. If others have already jumped on this bandwagon, you need to be able to go a few steps further.

Try simple things like:

  • A partial holiday season opt-out in case people just don’t want to hear from you during the season – you can always go back to them with a killer offer in the New Year!
  • Use methods like triggering so that you get the most relevant targeting possible.
  • Make your content drive home the benefits of buying from you during the season.
  • Opt for targeting customers who are primarily inactive during other times of the year.
  • Make the unsubscribing option available and easy – in fact easier than the path to complaint.

The point is to make the experience of your content simultaneously desirable and respectful of the pace and demands of their time during this busy end of year season.