Getting Ready for the 2022 Holidays – Is Your MarTech Stack Set Up for Personalizing at Scale With Automation?

Today’s customers are expecting more than ever that relevant content be served to them — but how? How do we build and serve this content across your entire subscriber list?

In our past few blog posts, ListEngage has provided recommendations to prepare you for the 2022 holiday season, including describing the importance of having the right technology at your fingertips to be set up for success.  

In this post, we are going to highlight the importance that data has in your personalization efforts, as well as discuss how marketing automation can help you reach and exceed your holiday 2022 goals.

Data Can Make or Break Your Email Campaigns

Have you ever received an email that made you roll your eyes and think “Gee, this company knows nothing about me?” Receiving the wrong email at the wrong time can be all it takes for someone to unsubscribe and lose their business. ListEngage’s Bryan da Frota dives deep into the importance that data plays in your email program.

And here are three data tips for the holidays that you can accomplish RIGHT NOW:

1. Know your holiday audience. A key component of email marketing that is sometimes overlooked is your email deliverability. By knowing who you’re going to target in the holiday months, you can avoid the pitfalls that come with expanding the size of your audience, at the most critical time for your business.

2. Look at your data for those people who purchased a year ago and may have lapsed since then. By digging a bit deeper in the holiday time period, you could be reactivating the holiday-only buyers. Perhaps consider a special journey just for these customers with faster exits for non-engagement so it doesn’t negatively impact deliverability.

3. Mine the data you already have before trying to get more. Can you target preferred categories of items? Can you see items shipped to a different billing address (likely a gift purchase)? Take advantage of the rich data you already have for segmentation and targeting, personalization, and journey paths.

Deliver Relevant Content

When considering how you plan to deliver relevant content to your customers for this holiday season, ask yourself these three key questions:

1. Does your data support your personalization goals? The sophistication of your personalization strategy should align to the data you have available. What data do you have about your customers, and how can you speak differently to them based on that data. You may also need to augment your current data with additional data. For example, if you want to personalize the products you are promoting based on current weather, but you don’t know the customer’s location, now is a great time to incorporate and test these additional data sets.
2. Do you have the resources to create the content for your holiday campaigns? Perhaps less content is needed by properly segmenting your audience. Customer profiles are a great tool to help segment your audience into manageable data sets for targeted content.  Divide and conquer as they say!
3. Does your email technology allow you to easily ingest new data, segment your customers, create dynamic content, and deliver the right message at the right moment in the right channel, in an automated (i.e., not through manual sends) fashion? If you’re already using Salesforce Marketing Cloud and you don’t have these capabilities and others set up (such as Einstein Content selector), a seasoned partner like ListEngage can get your account setup and team enabled to be equipped with many of them before the holiday rush sets in!

Save Time this Holiday Season with Automations

Remember when the assembly line revolutionized the automotive building industry?  Me neither! But I can understand the impact it had way back then, and how the idea has been transformed over time to adapt to all aspects of life. Insert, Marketing Automation.

Holiday 2022 is fast approaching, and we want to ensure you’re equipped with as many tools as possible.

Here are some of the key marketing automation tips to help get ahead during the holiday season:

1. Confirm fundamental email best practices are running and optimized within your program: Welcome, basic transactions (order and shipping confirmations), and Abandon Cart Trigger.
2. Are you currently using Email Studio to launch a majority of your ad hoc emails? Take advantage of Send Time Optimization, Einstein Content Selector, and more, by using Journey Builder within Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
3. Consider marketing within your transactional emails — add “you might also like” to these emails. Just be sure to make the primary message of the transactional message the transaction, though.

*BONUS Holiday TIP*: ALWAYS PROMOTE GIFT CARDS! (if your platform can support them)

And Last but Certainly Not Least…

The average marketing tech stack is growing more complicated every year. It’s more important than ever to simplify and automate where possible. Don’t use valuable time with manual file imports when most marketing automation tools allow you to set up batch feed or API-driven data integrations. These automated integrations ensure vital information, like conversion data, doesn’t fall through the cracks due to human error.

Automations in your marketing campaigns are paramount to maximizing your marketing efforts, while saving you time and money. They’re also a great tool for improving customer experience.

These automations and many more are available through Saleforce’s extensive suite of products.

At ListEngage, we spend every day partnering with our customers to improve their business, including mastering the art and science of automation! If you have questions, contact us to schedule a conversation.

Stay tuned to the ListEngage blog for more great information on preparing for the holiday season. The next article in this series will take a deeper dive into reporting on ROI and other key metrics. Sign up for the rest of the series below.

Interested in learning more about this topic? Sign up for the rest of our series on how to prepare for the holiday retail season.

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