With the holiday season right around the corner, many email marketers are deep within the planning and execution cycle and still wondering if they've done everything possible to make 2014 the biggest holiday season ever. What steps can you still take this year to ensure your emails stand out above the rest in the inbox and help you exceed your sales targets?

If you're looking for proven quick wins that you can still easily incorporate into your overall strategy, you've come to the right place. All of these tactics can easily be set up in time for your 2014 holiday campaigns

Ensure that openers don't see expired content.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday kick off the biggest shopping period of the year. Don't waste email opens with expired content-keep shoppers informed of live offers, shipping cutoffs, and current product availability:

• Feature live offers: With limited-time sales, brands can be rotating through many different offers in a single day or week. Keep users engaged by showcasing the amount of time left in a sale and always showcase the deal that is live when they open their email.
• Count down to the end of a sale. Once expired, swap out the offer message to other relevant content.

• Let shoppers know when they've missed the cutoff for express shipping. Once they've missed the opportunity, promote gift cards or in-store sales.

Shown after Rush Shipping has expired:

Shown after any shipping option has expired:

• Swap out of stock items with trending items: The huge surge in traffic during the holiday means that inventory will be selling out in a flash. Use agile email technology to make sure recipients only see items that are available with real-time merchandising by pulling trending items directly from your website.
• 7 For All Mankind's top sellers are pulled directly from their website into their email below:

• Bonus tip: Increase relevance from this real-time merchandising by pulling different items based on the time of day, device, and even the weather at the moment of open.

Automatically optimize content based on click-through or conversation rate.

Live content enables marketers to easily optimize email creative by recipients at the moment of open, and to automatically select a winner during the course of a campaign. You send only one version of your campaign to the entire audience and we'll serve each of your creative variations at random. A winning creative is automatically selected during the course of the campaign based on a factor of statistical confidence, and you can be sure that the campaign captures the highest engagement possible.

Create a personalized experience to speak directly to your customer.

Thank your customers with a personalized message or gift tag. You can include any data that you have on file for a user. For example, you can thank users in an animated card for the specific product they purchased or create an animated list from Santa with products they have recently viewed or abandoned.

These are just a few tips for enhancing your holiday email campaigns. Check out our e-book for additional ideas or reach out to a Movable Ink campaign strategist for a free session on how you can add some additional life to your 2014 holiday campaigns.

About the Author
Lalit Chopra, Director, Strategic Partnerships. Lalit works with leading digital marketing companies, agencies, and service providers to build engaging email marketing campaigns with their clients. Movable Ink is a Salesforce Marketing Cloud HubExchange partner. Their agileEMAIL HubExchange app seamlessly integrates with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, enabling you to sense and respond in real-time to each recipient's time, location, device, and even the weather at the moment of open. Check out their HubExchange app today!