With the New Year underway, several email marketers are reflecting back on their holiday campaigns. Some are basking in the glory of their efforts, while others are just trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Regardless of the results, it is always a good practice to review both the successes and failures of your holiday campaigns. In this article, we will explain why committing to this is so important.
Valuable Insight for the Future
Aside from looking at your sales numbers, how do you know which aspects of your holiday campaigns truly made an impact? Without going back and giving them a thorough review, making these determinations can be difficult at best. Your campaign may appear to be dressed for success to you, but as you probably know, not even a great design and relevant content can guarantee desirable results. Taking the time to review performance is a way to bring yourself back to earth so to speak. Instead of going on emotion and assumptions, you deal with facts in the form of statistics that show you just how well (or bad) you performed. The insight you uncover can lay the foundation for greater success with future campaigns.
Key Trends in the List
Email marketers often assume that the basic structure of the list remains constant more than they probably should. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Just as your business and marketing strategy evolves, so does the nature of the list. Perhaps you started working with more detailed data to segment your list for better targeting. Maybe you failed to address the hard bounces and inactive subscribers on your list. Whatever the case, there are many factors that impact the performance of your holiday campaigns. By reviewing them, you can very well likely identify important trends in your list that correspond to both your successes and failures.
Optimal Timing and Execution Revealed
Timing is crucial to an email marketer. To most, it usually comes down to a matter of what time of day or day of the week to send. When it comes to holiday marketing, however, it is often a matter of what month, day of the month, or season. Did the campaign you sent on the day before Cyber Monday fail to make the impact you were expecting? If so, it may have not been delivered in enough time for your subscribers to react. On a similar note, if the campaign launched mid-November kept the sales coming in throughout the holiday season, you probably got started at just the right time. Going back to review these programs gives you clearer insight into the timing and execution that can be effective next year.
When an email campaign performs well or poorly, we often assume that its success or failure is attributed to one obvious factor or another. While that is indeed the case in a sense, it is these assumptions that can lead us to draw the wrong conclusions. By taking the time to review your holiday campaigns, you have a better chance of understanding exactly what made them a hit, or what needs to be improved upon without all the guesswork.
Nan King, a tech geek and environmentalist at heart, is an advocate of business email marketing strategies that encompass the use of an email marketing company which is permission based.