Email marketing is one of the MOST important things you can do during Q4 to amplify your sales. Here are a few tips and tricks you can implement throughout the season to get more attention and engagement in the inbox.
As I always say, email inboxes are like Twitter feeds, and you will have to compete for people’s attention. I want to ensure you are so confident in the emails you send this season that you’re not afraid to keep showing up.
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Create Great Subject Lines
Now, what I’m about to say is going to sound a bit contradictory considering I just told you about a product I offer that has subject lines in it… but I am a firm believer that subject lines aren’t quite as important as most people make them out to be.
Do subject lines matter? Yes. Are the end all be all of getting your emails opened? No. In my experience, the MOST important factor in getting your emails opened is actually your relationship with your email subscribers. But… that’s a conversation for another day.
While your subject lines aren’t necessarily going to make or break your email strategy this holiday season, I do know they can be a source of frustration for business owners, so let’s chat about few things I’ve learned along the way.
Adjust Your Subject Line Based on the Content
My number one tip is to be clear over clever, when it counts. For example, when you’re sending an email about a sale… I have consistently found that putting the sale details in the subject line is more effective than saying something clever, witty, suggestive, etc.
I think this is especially important during a busy season like Q4. Consumers are likely scanning their inbox looking for the best deals and want to see what stands out. If it’s not obvious that you have a promotion happening, they might skip your email altogether.
If the email you’re sending isn’t specifically about a sale, then have fun with your seasonally inspired subject lines that get people in the mood. I love to play on pop culture and song lyrics, you’ll see a bunch of those types of examples in the Holiday Content Bundle.
Be Playful With Emojis
You can also use emojis to get attention. This of course is nothing new, and admittedly some brands have overused these or can get excessive with them. But a cleverly placed clock or emergency siren is a great way to add a little urgency to your emails.
You can learn more about using urgency and scarcity in your marketing in episode 298.
Use Numbers in Your Subject Line
Another great way to make your subject line stand out is to use numbers. Whether you’re calling out a promotion, counting down the days until a sale is over, or featuring 5 of your best-selling products… if you can add a number to your subject line it’s probably worth it.
The human brain loves numbers. They’re a lot easier to read and comprehend. There’s no ambiguity, no confusion. Sure, it takes away a little of the mystery… but as I’ve already mentioned mystery isn’t always your friend during the holiday season.
For example: instead of saying “Big Holiday Sale” Say “20% Off Your Purchase”
Leverage A/B Testing to Find Winning Subject Lines
At the end of the day, if you’re not sure what types of subject lines work best for your people – set up an A/B test and see what happens. While a traditional A/B test will send out both versions to your a small subset of your email list and then send the winner to the remainder of your list a few hours later – during the height of the holiday season – your don’t have time to wait for a winner to be chosen.
In that situation, I recommend you just send it to everyone and look at the results afterward to find the winner. Then you can use that information to improve the subject lines in the rest of your emails.
If you’re listening to this in real-time, you can start testing some of these theories now so by the time we get to peak shopping season you’ve already got the information you need.
Be Mindful of When You Send Your Emails
Now, as I mentioned, subject lines aren’t the end all be all of getting people to open your emails. And while your relationship with them – that’s why it’s so important to be consistent throughout the year – is going to likely be the biggest driver of your success… there’s another factor that gets overlooked by most eCommerce marketers I know.
The time and day that you send your emails.
Historically, across multiple different businesses, industries, etc. I have always found that evening emails, on Sundays, and Tuesday – Thursday generate more revenue than emails sent at any other time or day.
This is often surprising for a lot of people until they really start to think about their customers. If your customer works a 9-5 or has kids – what are the chances they can whip out their credit card and make a purchase at 9 am or 3 in the afternoon?
The window of 6-9 pm has always performed best and it makes perfect sense when you consider that after dinner people are sitting on their couch scrolling through their phone.
Now again, this is just a general pattern that I’ve seen over the years. That doesn’t mean that if you’re sending emails and 3 pm and they’re killing it, you should stop doing that.
The idea is to get into your customers’ head and figure out when is the best time for them.
All that said, when it comes to the peak of the holiday shopping season – those habits might change and that’s okay.
My goal for you isn’t to necessarily figure out the perfect sending time in the next few weeks – but just for you to be thinking about it and be intentional with your strategy.
Like your subject lines, this is something you can test a bit over the next couple of weeks so you have a bit of a better idea.
Get Creative With Interactive Content
Now that you’ve gotten them to open your email, it’s time to get them to click. An easy way to do that is with interactive content. What does that look like?
Use Animated GIFs to Catch Their Attention
Of course, animated GIFs are an easy way to jazz up your email and grab their attention. If you just want to emphasize a mood in your email you can grab something from Giphy and drop it in there.
If you have a holiday bundle or a collection of best-selling products you can use a gif to cycle through the different items that are available. You can keep it simple by just animating the text on a hero image too.
One caveat here is that Klaviyo only allows a maximum image size of 5MB, so if your GIF is too intricate, has too many frames, or is just too big – it’s going to be hard to get it small enough to use in your email.
While Canva makes it super easy to create GIFs, you’ll likely need a separate online tool to optimize it. There are a ton out there that will let you resize the image, remove frames, compress it, etc. A quick Google search will find them for you.
I will say, I am notorious for spending way too much damn time optimizing gifs to get them small enough so don’t be like me. Keep them simple so they stay naturally small.
Feature A Quiz or a Survey
Another way to engage your email subscribers is to promote a quiz. Whether you send them to your product recommendations quiz, or you turn it into a gift finder – customers love a good quiz.
If you don’t already have a quiz and you don’t have time to create one, you could create a decision tree in your email to guide them toward the best product for them.
You can also ask a one-question survey that only requires them to click a specific button based on their answer. You could ask them questions like who are they shopping for, what their top shopping priority is (for example: unique gifts vs. finding the best deal) and then link them to the most applicable collection.
Use Strategic Segments for a More Personal Approach
For Q4, especially your Black Friday, and Cyber Monday sales, I recommend you limit segmentation to excluding people who have already bought from you.
The truth is, you can OVER segment your list, especially when it’s small.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some key groups of subscribers you can identify and tailor your messaging to them.
The segments I focus on the most are that are lifecycle-based – meaning where is this customer in their journey with you, and what are their typical shopping habits?
- Do you have a segment of customers who only buy from you during the holiday season?
- Do you have a segment of customers who only ever buy from you when you’re running a sale?
- Do you have a segment of customers who haven’t been super engaged with you this year?
- Do you have a segment of customers who still haven’t purchased from you?
Once you identify what segments might make sense for your business and who they are, it might be worth it to target some different messaging to them leading up to Black Friday weekend.
For example, for those customers who maybe aren’t your ideal customer but buy for someone who is, you might have to start warming them up a little bit earlier so they don’t forget you exist. It’s possible they fell out of your engaged segment and haven’t received an email from you in a while; you’ll want to be intentional about getting them back into the rotation.
For the customers who have been on your list for a bit, but still haven’t purchased. Maybe you want to send them a text-based email asking them if they have any questions about your products so you can answer those and overcome any potential objections before the holiday shopping season is in full swing.
Again, I don’t want you to go crazy with segmenting during the heavy shopping season, but being intentional about how you warm up them can make a difference in how engaged they are during that time.
Optimize for Mobile & Dark Mode
You’re doing all this work to create emails and engage your customers, let’s make sure they can actually read them. We already know how important optimizing your emails for mobile is, but don’t forget to consider dark mode.
The number one thing that will make this easy, is to use as much web text as possible. Using web text vs. images with text on them will ensure your email properly responds on mobile and will be larger and easier to read.
You’ll also want to make sure your buttons are big enough for fat thumbs and there is enough space between clickable elements.
If you’re hell-bent on using mostly image emails, especially with Klaviyo’s new Canva integration, make sure you’re designing mobile first. Sometimes to get the right size text and buttons on mobile means they’re a smidge large on desktop, but that’s not a big deal. Most people are reading on their phones anyway.
If you’re super picky about it, and you use a tool like Klaviyo, you can create a separate desktop and mobile version of that image.
Dealing with dark mode is a beast all its own. Of course, if you’re using image-based emails this won’t be as much of an issue. But it can come into play for background colors and text. Each email service provider treats dark mode a little bit differently, but your best bet is to expect your colors to invert. Everything that is dark will become light and vice versa.
I go more into detail about designing for dark mode in Klaviyo Badassery, but the best thing you can do is to switch it on your phone and send yourself an email to see how it’s going to look.
Analyze Performance & Record for the Future
My last tip is to analyze the performance and adjust along the way – and to keep track of your work.
You spend a lot of time on your holiday marketing campaign and sending all these emails. Make sure you keep track of any insights throughout the season and make adjustments if necessary.
For example, during Black Friday weekend, I recommend you send A LOT of emails. But you might find that you’re losing engagement and you need to pull back. Or maybe you’re getting a lot of clicks and not a lot of sales so you have to adjust your approach.
While I want your emails to be as set-it and forget-it as possible, you should still check in on them and make adjustments if needed.
I also recommend you organize your emails so you can easily reference back to them in the future. In Klaviyo you can tag them all with Holiday 2024 so you can easily filter later on. You can create a spreadsheet of all the emails you send and stick a link directly to that email in your email marketing platform for easy access.
Do your best to be intentional with your campaign naming along the way as well so you know what that email was about.
Aside from keeping track of the results and learning what campaigns perform best, I also want you to make it easy for yourself to repurpose that content in the future.
As I’m sure you’ve heard me say, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time – and if you essentially run the same promo or similar marketing campaigns there’s no reason why you can’t just reuse your emails year over year. No need to create more work for yourself, right?
The trick is to keep yourself organized from the jump instead of trying to dig through your archives in 2025.
Listen to the Episode
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction and Importance of Email Marketing
00:39 Holiday Content Bundle Overview
01:37 The Truth About Subject Lines
02:49 Crafting Effective Subject Lines
06:29 Optimal Email Sending Times
08:45 Using Interactive Content to Boost Engagement
10:10 Promoting Quizzes for Engagement
10:23 Engaging Customers with Quizzes and Surveys
11:14 Personalizing Your Marketing Strategy
12:20 Segmenting Your Audience for Better Results
14:50 Optimizing Emails for Mobile and Dark Mode
17:12 Analyzing and Adjusting Your Email Campaigns
18:15 Organizing and Repurposing Your Content
20:00 Conclusion and Additional Resources
Resources & Episodes Mentioned
The Holiday Collection
Get everything you need to plan, create, and sell this Q4: proven content prompts, high-converting gift guides, and a complete campaign strategy built for busy eCommerce founders.
