There’s much that marketers can be doing right now to ensure a smooth and successful holiday marketing campaign, and email is an easy channel to plan ahead for.

Top tips for polishing your holiday email marketing campaign include:

1. Send out emails early to capture those early-bird shoppers.

2. Prepare an auto-responder for those periods when you may be too busy to create new content..

3. Promote your gift cards, which are proving to be a very popular gift option this year.

4. Increase convenience by providing easy web-to-store deliveries or entice users in to their local store.

5. Ramp up relevancy – your customers will be inundated with emails over the next few weeks, so make sure yours are relevant, targeted and relate to any historical shopping data you may have on each customer.

6. Keep your delivery dates clear or consider a delivery countdown clock to ensure your customers won’t be disappointed or caught unawares.

7. Offer free shipping, most of the big online stores are offering free or heavily discounted shipping rates.

8. Concisely categorize your products so consumers can go straight to the items they are looking for, i.e. Gifts for Her, Gifts for Pets, Gifts for Teens.

9. Include a call to action in every email, whether it be to update their personal information, download a new brochure, view a special offer or enter a competition.

10. Last, but not least, check your email deliverability to ensure your messages aren’t being deleted before they even get to your customer’s inbox.

By Helen Leggat Bizreport.com