For retail marketers, November is the time of year when your polished, customer-engagement plans kick into overdrive.  If you are a consumer, your inbox feels different. You wake each morning with more unread emails than your usual daily volume. The anticipation of the must-have, too-good-to-be-true-deals fuels many consumers to purchase throughout the commerce-fueled holiday season. Marketers are offering amazing deals and they all have one simple goal in common:  convert those message “clicks” into sales and, ultimately, ongoing customer loyalty.

Of course if you listen to the gurus on the business channels, you all know the macroeconomic headwinds are pretty gusty right now, and no one is sure whether we’re headed towards a recession or a soft landing. However, even with the headwinds, Cyber Week is expected to drive approximately $37.2 billion in online spending according to Adobe’s holiday 2023 forecast, and this means your inbox will see an endless stream of deals for you to act upon.  

For me, this holiday season brings a new opportunity, a new perspective. One that for a decade and a half, I haven’t had the pleasure to experience. This is my first year not being behind the scenes at one of the world’s largest B2C Messaging providers.  It also means that for the first time in 15 years, I will actually be able to smoke a turkey without worrying about getting a text message from a customer or a proactive alerting system!  I will sit down at the table with my family and eat a meal uninterrupted by anything work-related. Yet my experience has taught me so much that I couldn’t pass up the chance to share a few last-minute tips and tricks on navigating the holiday season if you are in the practice of sending consumer messaging campaigns:

• Know how to engage your technology providers.  Technology is not infallible. When something goes wrong – and believe me it will! – having the right teams at your fingertips can make all of the difference.  Understand how to leverage your vendor's escalation process, know your key contacts, and most importantly, make sure it works.
• Prioritize your key customer engagement campaigns.  Are your transactional messages (order confirmations, password resets, etc.) the most critical for your business? Or do you prioritize the promotional campaigns?  If something in your technology ecosystem fails at the wrong time, do you have processes to ensure your highest priority services are still being delivered? At a bare minimum, make sure you know who is your technical account manager, customer success representative, or account executive.  They are your advocates and can help you quickly navigate their organization to engage the right people.
• Understand your tech stack.  Are you leveraging a single tenant or multi-tenant instance in your messaging stack?  Do you have shared or dedicated IP addresses?  Knowing the answers to these questions will help you and your teams understand if another customer could be impacting your campaign throughput and performance. 
• Don’t be greedy.  Yes, that dormant, unengaged audience segment looks so enticing, but please fight the urge.  Don’t ruin your holiday metrics by dumping a poorly engaged segment into a large-scale campaign.  The ISPs certainly won’t give you any prizes and you might just end up on a Spamhaus Block List (SBL).  

Holiday planning and execution at its heart is the philosophy of Kaizen; the work we do today should be the basis for continuous improvement and help drive incremental improvements tomorrow.  Our team at The Basement is here to help.  If you are interested in learning more, our Integration Services team at The Basement is part of a full-service integrated agency based in Indianapolis.  We deliver radical clarity to agile brands by leveraging modern storytelling and data acumen. 

About the Author

Kevin Siminski is an Executive Vice President at The Basement. He joined the agency in mid-2023 to lead the Integration Services practice after spending 14 years as senior product executive with Salesforce. He has worked with many of the world's largest brands on digital transformation initiatives.