Email marketing is consistently one of the most effective ways to build connections with customers – and during the holiday season, it sits at the core of most marketing strategies. But how do you ensure your email gets delivered, opened, and read at a time when customers see an even higher volume of marketing messages in their inboxes?  

In this article we’ll review best practices to keep in mind, as well as key steps to take to ensure deliverability. 

Follow email marketing best practices

When trying to get customers’ attention in a busy holiday season inbox, the goal should be to provide value. This increases the chance of converting potential customers and can also trigger more engagement with the other emails you send.  

To enhance personalization and relevance, use behavioral triggers like browsing activity, cart abandonment, or time spent on product pages, to automate timely, one-to-one messages.  

Boosting engagement through opens and clicks helps with IP and domain reputation, increasing your brands’ ability to consistently get mail delivered. If you don’t provide value and increase the volume of email you’re sending, your messages will see reduced engagement and increased spam complaints, which can start to drop your sending reputation and make it even harder to get into the recipient’s inbox. 

But how can you be sure you’re providing value and driving engagement? 

1. Clean your mailing lists: Before entering the holiday season, check your email lists for recipients that didn’t opt in, have misspelled addresses, are old or inactive, or are spam trap addresses. Removing these from your lists will help you maintain a healthy IP and Domain reputation and reduces the chances of your messages getting blocked or going to spam.    
2. Use first-party and behavioral data for smarter holiday targeting: Leverage triggers, such as past purchases, browsing history, and engagement patterns to create segmented, hyper-personalized campaigns that resonate with individual customer needs. Provide timely, relevant messages like gift guides, early access offers, or cart reminders based on real-time behaviors to increase engagement, build trust, and drive conversions during the crowded holiday season. 
3. Grab attention: Your email subject line and preheader are your chance to get your subscribers’ attention in a crowded inbox. Invoke a sense of urgency and exclusivity to pique interest and inspire them to click. Use A/B testing to experiment with different positioning to find what works and be sure to always stay within character count limits. 
4. Be concise: Be sure that the headline and body of your email is clear. Use bullet points whenever possible, and make sure your headline connects to the subject, so readers know what is being offered. 
5. Segmentation is key: This is essential for sending messages that resonate with subscribers, boosting deliverability, and increasing engagement. Beyond demographics, look to segment by factors like engagement level, email provider, past purchases, or location. Segmenting at a granular level can help you deliver relevant emails that your subscribers are likely to engage with and get value from. Always keep relevance in mind when sending emails to your lists – pushing irrelevant content into customer inboxes will detract from your marketing outcomes. 
6. Perfect your CTAs: Your call to action is essential. Create CTA buttons that are eye catching and easy to find, and ensure you have a CTA button displayed above the fold. Test different wording, designs, and placements to find what works. 

Focus on deliverability guidelines 

After Gmail and Yahoo began reducing spam and phishing by setting strict sender requirements, Microsoft implemented their own set of requirements. While this should improve the experience for email recipients, marketers need to make sure they are following the latest guidelines before we kick off the holiday season. 

Ensure you are up to date on the latest requirements:  

1. Set up SPF and DKIM email authentication for your “from address” domain to reduce the likelihood of your emails bouncing or being marked as spam.  
2. Ensure from address domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records (aka PTR records).  
3. Keep spam rates reported in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. One way to achieve this is to send relevant content to your most active and engaged users.  
4. Set up DMARC email authentication for your “from address” domain.   
5. Align the domain in the from header (the from address field in your email template) with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain in order to pass DMARC alignment.   
6. Ensure marketing messages and subscribed messages support one-click unsubscribe and include a visible unsubscribe link in the body of the message.    

Beyond those updates, you can take additional steps to improve deliverability, including:  

Using inbox and seed list testing 

 

Inbox and seed list testing will provide you with increased visibility into an email’s performance before a production send. This gives you time to fix any issues that may be causing it to be blocked or sent to spam. One way to test an email is to send it to a personal account to see where Gmail or Yahoo is placing the message in the inbox. 

Sending to your most engaged recipients 

 

This audience will give you the biggest ROI on your email marketing, and a common mistake that brands make is including stagnant/old email addresses in holiday blasts. Sending to those addresses increases the risk of not being able to deliver the message, which can result in complaints and non-engagement, thereby reducing the chance of getting your email to even the most engaged recipients. 

Monitoring your IP and domain reputation 

 

Your IP and domain reputation helps determine the folder in which inbox providers place your email. To help with this, aim to keep your spam rate below 0.10%. A low spam rate makes senders more resilient when there are occasional spikes in user feedback. 

Get your timing right 

 

Black Friday is typically when email volume surges. Send your messages one to two weeks ahead of that time to help capture attention before recipients see an uptick in marketing messages in their inbox. Plus, getting your messages out before Black Friday can also mean speedy delivery times because the inbox provider is not as flooded with incoming emails. Finally, explore ways to optimize your send time so that emails are reaching recipients at the time of day when they get the best engagement. 

To discover how your email stacks up and learn tips to improve, check out our 2025 Marketing benchmark report. Additionally, if you’re ready to take your campaigns to the next level, explore our book Relationships are built on one send to discover 15 campaign ideas for engaging your audience across the entire customer lifecycle.