July has come and gone, August is here and before you know it September will be over, and Holiday commercials and emails will start dropping left and right. 

This is a busy time of the year for email marketers as they plan their holiday campaigns and end-of-year strategy. Spending countless hours preparing layouts, messaging, subject lines, etc. it’s easy for a very important part of the process to get lost in the chaos – email list hygiene.

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We’d like to focus on steps that are sometimes overlooked when planning holiday marketing campaigns. Take these measures to make sure your messages reach the inbox during the busiest time of the year. 

1. Start Growing Your List Early

If you’ve waited to grow your email lists for the holiday season, you’re already behind. If your goal is to drive the maximum sales at the end of the year, you should have started to grow your data months ago; you have some ground to catch up on! But avoid the temptation to cheat the system and buy email lists; nothing good comes out of a bought list. There could be hidden threats such as honeypots, spam traps, bots, screamers and much more in that data you just purchased.  (Read: 7 Reasons Why You Should Never Buy An Email List) 

2. Clean Your Data 

It’s imperative that you run your email data through email hygiene processes. Why?  Because email hygiene detects more harmful threats in your data, unlike verification. According to a report from The Relevancy Group, “ Real-time email verification is a necessary tactic to ensure that email addresses are valid, but it is an incomplete defense. To improve deliverability and suppress against multiple threats, marketers need to adopt verification and email hygiene.” 

Email verification is a great solution to detect bounces but it does little to guard against those threats such as spam traps, honeypots, moles, bots and much more that can tarnish your sender reputation and deliverability right as the holiday season ramps up.

3. Enrich Your Data

Today’s consumers expect personalized, relevant experiences. And to provide those, you need relevant data – usually lots of it. 

Research indicates 3% or more  of customer data becomes obsolete due to changing conditions. Customers move, get married, change names, and adapt to new lifestyles. 

Marketers are always in need of updated and accurate customer profile information. They can either obtain this information by searching for supplementary data or purchasing new data from other parties. The reliability of these options varies greatly, and it’s hard to guarantee that the information you have purchased is valid. If you need to enrich your data to fill in the missing or outdated consumer information, consider data appending. 

Data Appending is simply filling in the missing pieces of your data, completing the puzzle you’ve already started. As long as you have some sort of information such as an email, phone number, or name, there can be more added. This reveals the complete customer picture and essentially saves data that might otherwise have been lost or set aside.  

More About Data Appends and How They Affect Email Success

4.  Target Audience & List Segmentation 

Without segmentation, your engagement rates tend to suffer. Open rates usually decline, while unsubscribes tick up. It’s hard to keep emails relevant and engaging if you’re sending the same thing to everyone.

Segmenting your list based on demographics, behavioral history, and transactional history helps maximize with your content relevancy. According to Mailchimp, “segmenting your lists had open rates that were 14.37% higher, clicks that were 64.78% higher, and unsubscribe rates were 8.89% lower than people who don’t segment their lists”. 

List segmentation can drastically improve your email marketing campaigns. Your audience is not all the same, and you know that. So why target them all the same, if they’re completely different? 

If you want your email campaigns to be successful this holiday season, one of your first priorities should be email list hygiene. Clean, reliable data truly is one of the most important components of email marketing!

About the Author 

Jenna Devinney has been the Marketing Specialist at Webbula for 2 years. Her key responsibilities are social media, and content marketing, and has written dozens of articles in the data solutions space. Check out Webbula’s Intelligence report page to learn more about what Webbula has to offer. 

About Webbula 

Webbula is the undisputed industry leader in data quality technology. Our emailHygiene and Data Appending services mitigate delivery threats, enhance data lists for email campaigns and create actionable audiences for online ad serving. Webbula has a proven track record of helping our customers navigate hazardous data quality obstacles and increase their return on investment.

Our passion remains what it has been since day one, to provide the confidence and reliability that our customers have come to depend on. Webbula pioneered and perfected email hygiene, the ability to detect Spam Traps, and much more – all in pursuit of truth in data. We look forward to another decade of leading the way and of helping all of our customers succeed.