• by Jess Nelson , November 11, 2015

Wednesday marks the seventh annual Singles Day, an Alibaba-made Chinese shopping holiday that IDC projects to generate $13.7 billion worth of sales this year. November will also be the biggest shopping month of the year for American retailers as holiday-minded consumers look to fill their shopping carts, both online and in-store.

Sales this holiday season are expected to rise 3.7% overall, according to the National Retail Federation, with a larger rate of growth expected online and via mobile devices. Adobe predicts online sales during the holidays will rise 11% to $83 billion total.

Knowing the importance of the upcoming sales season, what are the critical strategies email marketers should be considering? At the end of the day, it depends on your data.

1.     Time Is Of The Essence

Consumers are already shopping for the holidays. Nineteen percent of consumers even plan to do the majority of their shopping before November, per MarketTrack.

To increase their holiday marketing ROI, email marketers need to act quickly if they haven’t done so already by automating and segmenting their holiday marketing campaigns based on customer behavior and history.

“Make sure as a marketer or retailer that you’re set up to understand all of your data when it comes to consumer behavior. Who is coming to your site? And how you can respond to that? There’s a lot of data there that marketers should tap into,” says Fayez Mohamood, CEO at Bluecore.

Next week is the most critical time for email marketers to target shoppers who are planning to wait until Thanksgiving to shop, says Mohamood, citing a Bluecore study that says 90% of ecommerce emails opened and/or clicked between Black Friday and Cyber Monday were sent the prior week.

2.     Leverage Real-Time Data

The problem for some email marketers, however, is that they may lack the resources to analyze historical customer data.

Mohamood says that although it's too late to analyze last year’s Black Friday data, "there’s a lot of room to use more recent data and still amp up efficiency during the holiday season.”

Mohamood says the holidays are a critical time for retaining new customers, and the key is real-time data. He recommends that email marketers consider targeting casual shoppers with shortened time windows for product notifications.

“A lot of browsers during the holidays might be casual research who easily abandon their shopping carts. Think about casual behavior. If I was on the site this week and the price dropped on the product I was engaging with, that is very likely to convert to a sale,” Mohamood says.

Some 85% of consumers admit to abandoning a shopping cart online, according to a recent study by Talend. The company estimates this corresponds to four trillion dollars in potential revenue loss, but 30% could have been saved if the consumer had been retargeted and offered incentives to move forward with the purchase in a timely manner.

3.     Customer Service Is Still Key

Marketers with no access to data can still look to customer experience to stand out from the crowd.

“With both Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketers should be thinking about how they can set their communications apart from all of the other outreach to shoppers,” says Adam Weinroth, CMO of OneSpot. He asserts that email marketers still consider the in-store shopper as a vital target in their marketing campaigns.

“On Black Friday the doorbusters will be lining up no matter what. Focus on the experience. For instance, consider playing up the fact that your store locations are freestanding and have plenty of parking, or offer snacks, coffee and tea to those who line up early,” Weinroth says.