Vacation Email Marketing Do’s and Don’ts

Email marketing to cannabis and hemp licensees can be extremely effective in increasing year-end sales and engaging potential customers who are at the beginning of the buyer’s journey so you can promote them in the future.

However, the appeal of vacation email marketing is so great that many companies are quick to jump in and make mistakes – mistakes that can result in a return on investment for the tank. You don’t want this to happen to your campaigns. Hence, it is important to develop a strategy that prioritizes the following pros and cons of email marketing while on vacation.

5 Vacation Email Marketing Do’s

There are many ways to improve your email marketing results. Some of the top vacation email marketing topics to focus on include the following priorities:

1. Warm up your domain

If you suddenly increase the number of messages you send and how often you send them, email service providers (ESPs like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mailbox Providers) will see this activity and consider it unusual behavior. As a result, they will likely send more of your messages to the spam folder and your domain reputation will go down.

To protect your domain reputation so that ESPs see you as a good sender (not a spammer), you should warm up your domain before increasing your sending volume or frequency. Follow the link to learn more about warming up a domain to get your vacation messages to the inbox.

2. Create a plan and schedule

If you want the best results, you need a vacation email marketing plan. Make a schedule of when you will send messages, who they will go to, and what they will say. Sending a message is not enough. You need to create a sequence of messages to get people to act – especially during the holidays when their inboxes are fuller than ever.

To determine the best day and time to send your vacation messages, it is important to consider the behavior of the recipients. For example, in the Cannabiz Media License Database email tool, you can use the campaign optimization tools to determine the best day and time to send your campaigns based on when recipients opened your messages in the past. This is a quick and easy way to ensure that everyone gets your messages at the right time. Follow the link to learn more about planning and scheduling email campaigns while on vacation.

3. Personalize your content

The messages you send while on vacation and throughout the year should be tailored to the recipients so that they get the most relevant content. This includes personalizing your messages with first names and other demographic information whenever possible. For example, you can use merge tags in the Cannabiz Media License Database email tool to automatically personalize messages with each recipient’s name, status, etc. Most of the time, in order to personalize your message content, you need to create buyer personalities for your best customers, valuable customers, and so on. Use these buyer personas to segment your email marketing lists and create hyper-relevant content for each segment. Follow the link to learn more about how to create buyer personalities.

4. Test your messages

It’s easier to compose a message and send it to your entire list, but that’s a recipe for bad results. Instead, you should take the time to test each message before sending it to make sure it delivers the results you want and need. Test the subject line, message content, call-to-action (CTA), images, design, and more to see how different variations affect the open rate and click rate.

You can easily test your campaigns in the Cannabiz Media License Database email tool by using the “Select Top 100” feature and using custom tags. Create your list and campaign, use the “Pick First 100” feature to select the first 100 people on the list and give them a custom tag so you know they are your test group. Send your test message to them and review the results.

You can create as many test groups as you want to test different variations of your messages. When you’ve found the best performer, post this message on your full list. Only exclude the people you already sent the message to during your tests. Follow the link to learn more about A / B testing using the Cannabiz Media License Database.

5. Make sure your website can handle an increase in traffic

If your vacation email marketing is working, traffic to your website will increase. Make sure your website can handle the traffic. You don’t want to invest the time and money creating amazing email marketing campaigns only to land recipients who click the links in those messages and visit your website on a page that won’t load or on a website that is not available.

Before speeding up your vacation email marketing, check with your web host and make sure your website can handle the extra traffic coming from all of your vacation campaigns – email and other marketing channels.

5 Holiday Email Marketing Prohibitions

In Email Marketing, What Should Not You Do On Vacation? Here are some of the main prohibitions to avoid:

1. Do not send generic messages to bulk lists

Sending generic messages to large lists not only leads ESPs to believe you are a spammer, which leads to more of your messages ending up in spam folders due to lack of recipient loyalty, but it also leads to poor results for people who do them Messages receive these messages in their inboxes.

The reason is simple: lack of interaction with your messages indicates to ESPs that you are not sending messages that others want. To avoid spam, you need to segment your lists and send personalized, relevant content to each buyer personality. It is also the only way to get great results from your email marketing investments. Follow the link to learn more about email marketing list segmentation.

2. Do not send messages that end up in the spam folder

ESP’s spam algorithms contain thousands of criteria to determine whether senders are sending messages that are actually wanted, or whether they are sending unsolicited or obviously spammy messages. Every time you send a message, its algorithms are updated, so your sending history plays an important role in helping ESPs get your messages to the inbox or spam folder.

The key to staying out of the spam folder and getting into the inbox is to avoid getting items in your messages or using tactics known as spam triggers. Also, make sure to segment your lists and send relevant, personalized content to increase engagement and show ESPs that you are really sending messages that people want.

For example, don’t send messages that contain more pictures than text, or send messages that contain embedded forms, videos, or attachments. The list of known spam flags goes on and on. Follow the link to learn more about email marketing deliverability and spam triggers.

3. Don’t just send sales messages

Yes, your vacation email marketing messages should include special promotions. However, this doesn’t mean that you should only send promotional messages for yourself during the holiday season. It is important that you send useful content as well, otherwise you could look like a spammer. You don’t want people to mark your messages as spam, which will affect your future email deliverability. This means that more of your messages will be sent to spam and less to the inbox.

As you create your vacation email marketing plan and schedule, plan for where useful content versus promotional content will fit into the sequence of messages you send to each buyer personality.

Also, don’t send the same promotional messages over and over to everyone or the same people. Not only could this affect your future deliverability (if the commitment to the message is low or someone marks it as spam), but if the message didn’t work the first, two, three, or more times, it’s unlikely to ever work . Nobody wants to receive the same promotional message (or a similar message) multiple times.

4. Do not send messages that are not suitable for cell phones

About 50% of all email messages are opened on mobile devices. Therefore, it is important that your vacation email marketing messages (and all of your marketing email messages) load quickly and correctly on mobile devices.

That means you need to test every message you send to make sure it plays exactly the way you want it on your desktop and mobile before you send it. It’s easy to do with the preview feature in the Cannabiz Media License Database’s email marketing tool.

5. Do not skip the tracking results

If you don’t track your vacation email marketing results, there is no way you can improve your strategy and results for future vacation campaigns. That means you should keep track of who opens your messages, what links they click, what they do when they get to your website or complete the call-to-action in your messages, and much more.

In order to track and analyze your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you may need to do some settings before you can start sending your vacation messages. For example, you can set up UTM codes to keep track of the links, click those people who send them to your website, and what they do after they get to your website.

By using the Cannabiz Media License Database you can automatically keep track of who opens your messages and which links they click in your campaign performance data available for every message you send.

When these campaign metrics are combined with the website-level data that you can get from UTM codes and Google Analytics, you can get in-depth information on which campaigns are performing best, which need to be tweaked for the next vacation, and which are completely scrapped Need to become . You can follow the link to learn more about tracking email marketing results.

Essential Tips About Email Marketing While On Vacation

Vacation email marketing can make a significant difference in the brand awareness, brand loyalty, and sales of a cannabis or cannabis-related business. However, you need a plan, segmented lists, hyper-relevant content, and an understanding of what to avoid in order for your campaigns to be successful.

Want to see how the Cannabiz Media License Database can help you connect with cannabis and hemp license holders for targeted email marketing during the holidays and year-round? Schedule a demo!