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Last year on Black Friday, a major worldwide retailer sent more emails in a single day than they had the entire season prior. Their email campaigns delivered carefully crafted, dynamic content - with precision accuracy. The campaigns resulted in subscriber engagement that exceeded their projections. However, the previous year was a completely different story: a few miscalculations in content led 60% of their entire subscriber base to blacklist the retailer's email. All of this in the middle of the biggest email marketing weekend in the year.
Now think back to your own email deployments and sends during previous holiday seasons. What went well? What areas would you improve? And were there times when your campaign never even got off the ground?
The holiday season can account for as much 30% of a retailer's annual sales. According to the National Retail Federation, in 2016, holiday sales are expected to increase by 3.7% to $630.5 billion. So it's more important than ever to make sure your holiday email campaigns run smoothly and drive results.
Don't repeat past mistakes; instead, look for ways to improve your campaigns in the future. Taking advantage of expert recommendations can help to ensure your campaigns deploy successfully and email engagement increases during the holiday season.
If holiday email campaigns are an integral part of your annual marketing strategy and demand-generation activities, consider these best practices to make sure you get the most out of your holiday email campaigns with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Have you noticed more animated gifs and embedded videos in the emails you receive? Are you considering using A/B tests to ensure your subject lines resonate with your audience? Marketers today have more powerful tools than ever before to capture the subscriber's' attention. Get familiar with these tools and test content changes well before you need to deploy holiday campaigns .
Automation Studio is a Salesforce Marketing Cloud application used to execute multi-step marketing and data management activities on an immediate, triggered, or scheduled basis. Automations often run smoother and faster when you split multiple tasks into their own unique steps. In fact, we've seen automations run two to three times faster when tasks are separated into multiple steps.
If your automation steps include concurrent queries, extracts, or sends, then consider splitting them into separate steps to improve performance. There are exceptions, of course, so experiment and see what works best for you before your major deployments. Other minor tweaks to your Automation Studio processes, such as automation start times and frequency, have the potential to provide significant benefit with minimal changes needed.
Our next two best practices are for technical marketers.
When it comes time for that holiday email to go out, you want to be sure it's sent to its destination as quickly as possible. Which means now is the perfect time to fine tune your HTML and AMPscript email code, as well as Query Activity SQL logic, to ensure your emails are built and sent as quickly as possible. Optimizing your email code and queries will exponentially decrease send times and dramatically improve completion time, and will also help to improve the health of your database.
'Tis the season for email engagement, and your subscribers will be more active than ever. This is a good opportunity to make sure you are using API retry logic. Using this best practice will resend failed API calls to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, boosting delivery and success rates of your API feeds.
Here's a sample of API retry logic that you can use in Marketing Cloud:
You can find more API Best Practices at the Marketing Cloud website.
Interested in hearing more best practices to ensure your holiday email campaign goes off without a hitch? Register for our upcoming webinar. You'll get full access to one of our top Salesforce Marketing Cloud support experts, Shaun Barry, who has helped our customers successfully execute their holiday email campaigns.
Want to find out how to keep your Marketing Cloud up and running all the time with Salesforce's highest level of support? Check out our eBook.
About the Authors
Julie Tao is a Product Marketing Manager at Salesforce and has a passion for sharing insightful best practices to help customers get the most out of Salesforce. Julie has expertise in understanding customer needs and providing education and awareness to how Salesforce's powerful platform can help solve those needs.
Shaun Barry is a Principal Success Engineer at Salesforce, and has built his career helping customers solve the most complicated, technical challenges. Shaun has deep expertise in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and has successfully supported some of the world's leading retail and tech companies through their critical holiday email marketing campaigns.
