The stakes are high for holiday email campaigns at enterprise companies. Email volume is up, and year-end revenue goals are on the line. While the creative team brainstorms ideas for copy and design, the technology team should be looking at ways to use data and technology to improve ROI by connecting data sources, personalizing the email experience, leveraging automations, and optimizing reporting.
Connect your data sources
In most enterprise companies, data lives in different places. You might have some data in your ESP, some data in your CRM, and some data tied to your website or ecommerce platform. Perhaps different people own that data, and some may be less than eager to give up that control. But to effectively use data and technology to improve ROI for holiday email campaigns, you need a clear view of all your customer data in one place.
Start much earlier than you think is necessary to connect your data sources and fully test that data passes between them as expected. You’ll need buy-in from everyone who controls pieces of the data, plus a detailed plan for what data you need and how it will be used in your holiday email campaigns.
Getting data sources connected is a critical first step in using data and technology to improve ROI, and it’s definitely one to start well before the holiday email marketing season hits and the entire team gets swamped.
Personalize the email experience
Once you’ve invested the time and effort to connect your data sources, it’s time to use that data for effective personalization that drives better engagement and higher conversions.
Personalization is key for increasing ROI in holiday email marketing, and we’re not just talking first names and product recommendation. The holiday season is chaos for everyone’s inbox. Knowing your customer and delivering what they really want and need during the hectic holiday season helps you stand out in the inbox. Data and technology, when used well, can help you do that.
Review your available data and ask what deeper story it’s telling you about your customers. Do you know who classifies as a last-minute buyer, bargain hunter, or long-term repeat customer? Consider segmenting by those groups so you can target offers accordingly. If you have access to data from multiple marketing channels, you can leverage predictive analytics to determine which customers are most likely to respond to your next offer and target the messaging accordingly.
Leveraging your data to segment your audience and personalize subject lines, offers, creative, and send times helps ensure you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time. That, in turn, means better ROI for your holiday email campaigns.
Leverage automations and AI
Automations are a must-have component of any enterprise-level holiday email marketing strategy. Browse abandons, cart abandons, back-in-stock alerts, and post-purchase upsells play a critical role when so many brands are competing for attention in the inbox. For B2B companies sending holiday email campaigns, automations might include a welcome series, thought leadership campaigns, and lead nurture campaigns tied to specific subscriber actions.
At the same time, AI can help you optimize your content and better understand your subscriber data, which in turn frees up your time to focus on other aspects of your holiday email campaigns. There is no shortage of AI tools available for enterprise email marketers, so it’s important to identify where and how you want to leverage AI before deciding what tools to use. Once you know what you want to accomplish with AI and what capabilities you need from tool, it’s easier to narrow the options and evaluate which ones best meet your needs.
Use technology to optimize reporting
Optimizing reporting is one key place that enterprise companies can leverage AI, as available tools can analyze and act on significantly more data in a short period of time. The right AI tools enable you to quickly evaluate data and adjust, if needed, in the middle of your holiday email campaigns instead of only analyzing lessons learned after the fact.
Of course, even when using AI to optimize reporting, the first step is defining your key performance indicators for what you will measure and analyze. Will you track email engagement and average order value by segment or customer type? Do you want a year-over-year comparison of conversions? Or holiday season compared to Q3? Measuring what matters most and using technology to optimize reporting turns your holiday email marketing insights into a roadmap for future success.
Learn from your holiday email campaigns
Holiday email campaigns get lots of extra attention in enterprise companies, and it’s important to learn from them and apply those learnings to other campaigns. Many times, enterprise companies bring their best creative and leverage data and technology in new ways to hit year-end goals during the holiday season.
The same strategies for using data and technology to improve ROI for holiday email campaigns — connecting data sources, personalizing the email experience, using automations and AI, and optimizing reporting — can be applied throughout the year for better enterprise email marketing campaigns overall.
Before the hustle of the holiday email marketing season begins, block some time on your calendar for a team debrief of what worked, what didn’t, and what lessons learned can be applied to other campaigns to boost ROI throughout the year.
Want a deeper dive on data and technology for holiday email marketing? Download our free white paper, Leveraging Data and Technology in Holiday Email Marketing .
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