Why Outsourcing is The Safest Bet for Holiday Email Marketing

Digital marketers are busier than Hallmark during the holidays. They need to take care of a lot of things right from ensuring that bestsellers are in stock to promoting them and wooing customers to building lasting relationships with them. During the holidays, when people are in the buying spirit, you want to ensure they spend the last of their pennies on your brand. You leave no channel untapped to ensure the same. 

Email is one of the oldest and most classic, yet most personalized ways of reaching your audience during the holidays. Sharing personal details with you is a sign of faith that your customers have shown in you, and you must delight them with the emails you send on special occasions. Given the amount of work it takes, does it make sense to outsource your holiday email marketing efforts to another entity? Let’s discuss. 

Why Emails During Holidays Are A Must

There is more than one reason to support this. Let us look at the key reasons:

Expanding bases: During the holidays, you try to keep your relationship alive with previous customers as much as you turn the world upside down to attract new ones. With tempting offers, creative designs, and heartfelt messages, you have great chances of widening your subscriber base, your customer base, and your TA in general. If one awesome holiday email does the trick, someone could be a loyalist of your brand in the long run! 

Being mobile-savvy: As per a Castor report, from 2017 to 2020, mobile purchase numbers have leaped from 3.4% to 36.7%. A compelling 76% of Black Friday emails were opened by users on a mobile device, as per Movable Ink. The custom of checking emails on mobile phones and tablets doesn’t need a lot of statistics, frankly. You see it all around you. 

Emails have greatly adapted to the mobile way of things. Just optimize your email for mobile and you can now reach your audience on literally every device they use the internet for. Plus, email can be a link in a lot of other marketing efforts such as social media contests, reward systems, sales, etc. This makes it even easier for customers to avail benefits on their phones.

Immediate POS: It is all about the CTA. When your subscribers and audiences are in a shopping mood, the words ‘Buy Now’ on a button succeeding attractive products and offers would be tempting. This is the time when they are actively looking for sales. If they check out your subject line and open your email, they have decided to consciously invest in your proposition, unlike what they face with a GDN banner, for example. 

Your job has been made even easier with new-age, automated, and hi-tech emails that can build an entire store inside an email, without customers having to switch screens or tabs. The level of convenience you can offer here can convert a mere subscriber to a customer quickly. 

Best Holidays To Send Emails

You might find a lot of data supporting email blasts during a particular day of the week and time of the day for maximum reach, retention, etc. However, come holidays and all the rules change. Here are a few holiday email statistics that will convince you about some suspicions regarding the best times of the year for that crazy email campaign.

Thanksgiving: Research has proven that given the clutter of holiday emails, a lot of people stop opening promotional emails on Thanksgiving Eve itself. The abstinence continues until the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is when click rates and open rates revive and spike back to weekly averages. Hence, ‘Cyber Monday’ is indeed one of the best days to send your special offers and communications.

Christmas: The week prior to Christmas is your sweet spot. That’s when open rates increase by 6-10%. People hunt sales down and prepare by buying presents for their friends and families. However, as Christmas comes closer and until the Eve, they are busy wrapping presents, travelling, and making plans. Open rates are known to drop by around 45% on Christmas Eve. The drop continues for a few days after Christmas, too.

New Year’s: The trend that the Christmas slump in open rates continues up till New Year’s Day is nothing new for marketers. Most businesses mark a decline of around 60% in overall email marketing effectiveness on this day. Hope lies in the 2nd of January, a day after the festivities. Basically, after the 23rd of December, this is when you spring back in action. 

Holiday Emails: Outsourcing Vs In-House 

There is an inherent belief that no one will understand a business’ customers as well as the people actually working there. If you go by it, you might want to retain all your email marketing efforts. 

However, there are various concrete reasons why you will find it far better to outsource your holiday email marketing campaigns. 

Faster production: Your marketing team cannot put all their efforts into just emails. Training and refining them for the same takes a lot of time. Instead, you can create an overarching strategy and outsource email template production efforts. This way, you can focus more on evaluation, QA, and polishing of the email campaign.

Improved deliveries: Holidays are fast paced times in any marketing department. There simply isn’t enough mindspace to check for extensive A/B testing, auditing, ISP requirement filters, permission-based blocking actions, and other nitty-gritties. Tackling these details needs a specialized resource system which outsourcing can provide you with. 

Expert advantage: When you outsource your holiday email marketing campaigns to an agency, you are handing it over to the real experts of the game. They have been doing this for years, for different brands, probably for your own competitors too! Email marketing creativity and technique comes more naturally to them. Besides, they also own all the tools that you don’t need to buy or rent now.

Better response rates: The metrics that email specialists use would be different and more specific than yours. These include unique open rates, click to open rate ratios, unique click rates, open and click rate by domain, spam report rates, hard and soft bounce rates, etc. Better creation and better evaluation makes for a far better campaign. 

Cost effectiveness: Undertaking resource hiring, implementation, training, etc. specifically for seasonal campaigns could cost you a lot in the long run. Instead of paying freelancers separately, and buying a bunch of tools on your own, you could get the whole deal in one package by outsourcing to an agency. Strategy, planning, copywriting, design, coding, database management, web development, project management, and all the tech tools required for these will be covered in a single, convenient cost. 

Better standardization and optimization: Holiday email marketing campaigns are about much more than sales and offers. They are meant to target, retarget, reactivate, upsell, cross-sell, and even gather insights about latest marketing trends. Having a seasoned email campaign manager on your call will help you optimize each email as per these goals. All technicalities including deliverability and standardization of templates will be taken care of. You can actually target sections of your sales funnel in a proactive manner. 

When Not To Outsource Holiday Email Campaigns

Maybe, you have dedicated email marketing designers or experts in-house. You can probably outsource a part of your campaign and let your team collaborate with them on the rest. 

Maybe, yours is a unique product that will take a lot of explanation for an outsourced party. Your requirements could be extremely specific and this could need you to oversee every tiny step of the process. You might as well spend that time and effort on making the actual campaign yourself. 

But if these are not the cases, outsourcing is surely the way to go for your holiday email marketing campaign. 

In A Nutshell

Email marketing is a crucial and irreplaceable part of a holiday marketing campaign for almost any brand. This undertaking might be classic, but the endeavor keeps evolving. Only dedicated experts have the edge in understanding the smallest of trends, tech innovations, and creative developments in the field. If you can acquire all of those with convenience and cost cutting, why not spend just a little bit of time looking for a successful, promising, email marketing partner?