Don’t Let Your Holiday
Email Get Lost In The Inbox
Written by Franco Varriano.
1. Overview
The holiday season occurs at the same time annually, but for online retailers holiday marketing campaigns start earlier every year. Retailers do all they can to get consumers in a holiday shopping mindset as soon as possible, trying to be the first to win business.
Holiday messaging creates a lot of noise for consumers, but being ahead of the pack with your marketing is not the only thing that counts. Your message has to be different.
2. Standing Out Online
According to the Radicati Group, over 100 billion emails are sent and received daily. During the holiday season email volume increases, so how do you cut through the noise and reach your customers?
Creativity helps, and big budgets can buy you visibility but not necessarily results. At Rare we know that our customers stand out by treating their customers like individuals, rather than grouping them together and blasting them with one generic message.
Email is the only one-to-one method of online marketing out there. It’s the digital equivalent of a personal conversation, and your best chance to get your message through – if you do it right.
3. Personalize, Don’t Generalize
Generic email blasts no longer work because customers expect more. Technology has made online shopping experiences more personal, and they expect this to translate to email. You need to match those expectations to be effective.
Personalizing an email is more than just including a name in the subject line or the initial greeting. The actual email content should be tailored to each and every customer. Think about the effectiveness of hand-written note compared to a form letter. An email that comes across as the former is far more successful at connecting with the recipient.
So how do you “handwrite” email for hundreds of individual customers? Rare does this for you.
Rare connects to your customer purchase history and our predictive algorithms do the rest – analyzing purchase habits of individual customers to turn that into personalized product recommendations.
These personalized recommendations are inserted at the time of the email send, ensuring a relevant, personal email goes out every time. The end result is the aforementioned handwritten note in digital form, and up to 5 times more clicks than with a generic message!
4. How Does Your Email Look When It’s Opened?
Our data shows that well over 50% of emails are opened on a mobile device, and for many stores it’s as high as 75%. Our data also shows that a significant number of customers view your email on a mobile device first, and purchase on a desktop later.
This is why email must be fully responsive. Simply put, the recipient should be able to easily view and interact with the message, images and calls to action on any device, at any time. This increases the chance of action being taken either at the time of open, or at a later time when it’s more convenient for the recipient.
Mobile is a huge part of the holiday shopping experience, so make sure your email is ready. You can’t simply rely on your desktop email “shrinking” for a mobile device – it doesn’t work. The images may look okay, but often the text is unreadable and buttons are too small to click.
At Rare we’ve worked hard to make sure that your emails reflow between devices without having to write a single line of code. Just design your email using our intuitive, drag and drop email designer and we’ll do the rest.
5. Too Much of A Good Thing?
It’s tempting to send email with more frequency during the holidays, but even personalized, responsive email can lose it’s effectiveness if you send too often.
Our results shows that too many email sends result in lower open and click-through rates. You also run the risk of increased unsubscribe rates and even spam complaints.
Rare can help you determine the best time to send email to your customers. We provide insight on how much time typically elapses between purchases so you can determine the best time to send email. Combine these customer insights with automated scheduling to send at just the right interval.
6. Conclusion
As you plan your holiday email marketing you should also plan to use Rare.
Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.
Try Rare.io FREE!
And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.
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