Christmas in July: How Email Marketers Prepare for the Holiday Code Freeze

Email marketers are always working a season or two ahead. That means many are already hearing the faint sound of sleigh bells in the snow and thinking ahead to the holiday code freeze.

For those not familiar with the holiday code freeze, it’s the period — often starting in early or mid-November — when tech teams say no to any non-critical changes to websites, apps, and email systems.

The holiday season is a critical revenue window for many companies. This is especially true for B2C brands and their enterprise email marketing teams, and the stakes are high. Enterprise email marketing teams can’t risk a broken webpage or a missing product data feed, and a holiday code freeze minimizes that risk in two ways.

First, it reduces the total number of changes happening that could inadvertently break something else on the website or in an email flow. Second, it ensures the tech team has the time to quickly respond to any critical issues that might arise during the flurry of holiday emails and increased web and email traffic.

These four steps can help enterprise email marketing teams ensure they have what they need before the tech lockdown window begins.

Review your email calendar

Now is the time to start mapping out every email you plan to send between Black Friday and New Year’s Day. Take a close look at every aspect of those emails. Consider how they could be impacted by the holiday code freeze.

What customers will receive those emails? What content and creative assets will you need? Is there any additional data you need to make final decisions about your email strategy for the holiday season?

Refine your segmentation strategy

Once you’ve identified what emails you plan to send and who you’re sending to, it’s time to take a closer look at your segmentation strategy. Do you have the data you need to create those segments?

Each enterprise email marketing team is a bit different in structure and tools, so customize this step to fit your team’s needs. If most of your data lives in your email platform and the email marketing team builds segments, tech lockdown might not impact you as much as those companies whose tech teams create segments in a data platform and push them to the email platform.

Regardless of who is responsible for segmentation now is the time to review your plans. Make sure you have the data in place to effectively execute your holiday email campaigns. If you need additional data feeds or a new connection between systems, get it on the list now. Allow plenty of time for development, testing, and launch before the tech lockdown begins.

Start designing, coding, and testing

Reviewing your email calendar and refining your segmentation strategy are important steps in preparing for tech lockdown. But remember, you often won’t know there’s an issue until you start coding and testing emails.

Getting started on your holiday emails sooner rather than later lets you design, code, and test to ensure everything goes as planned to create a personalized email experience for your subscribers. Test everything you can think of — from dynamic content rules to personalized product recommendations to early VIP access. Then test again. If anything’s broken, get your tech team on it now.

Start testing early so there’s still time to fix it well before the holiday code freeze hits. If you wait until November, you may run into unexpected problems that result in lost revenue. Unexpected problems do not make for happy holidays.

Create contingency plans

We all know that sometimes stuff happens, especially in the enterprise email marketing world. There are some things you absolutely can’t plan for, like your entire ESP going down on Black Friday. However, there are many other ways to plan ahead to reduce risk.

Talk through potential issues like a key team member being out unexpectedly or a popular product going out of stock weeks earlier than expected or technical glitches on the website. Do some cross-training and ensure you have adequate fallbacks for product recommendations. Above all, know who to contact if something goes wrong with one of your systems. An enterprise email marketing team can’t plan for everything. But some early preparation now can help the entire holiday season go much smoother.

Need help before the holiday code freeze?

The holidays don’t have to be chaotic. With the right enterprise email marketing partner, they can be the most wonderful (and most profitable) time of the year. RPE Origin is a trusted partner for enterprise companies and agencies who rely on email for success. Contact our team today to learn more.