Well, it’s past that time of year again. Yes, past. Many companies start planning for the holiday season back in March, so if you’re just starting now…..hurry. Even if you’ve started, begin thinking now about what you can do to juice things up, and survive the holiday rush. Because let’s all admit it, volume will go up and consumers will go crazy. How do you be a hero, try something new and survive the hectic holiday period? Let’s take a look at the things you can do to save yourself and your team.

If you haven’t started your U.S. holiday campaign planning, it’s time to get cracking. To help you move things along, I’ve outlined the major online selling opportunities and created a handy calendar to help you get organized for the busy season. There are 14 important dates to build campaigns around.

Anyone have current figures on email reading on their PC vs. tablet vs. mobile?  I realize this is a basic question, so if there's some standing public research you can point me to, that'd be awesome, too.

Everything You Every Wanted to Know about Mobile Email: A Compendium of the World's Best Free Resources for Learning about Mobile Email Marketing

Article by Tracey Gordon, VP Client Services, and Paul Gordon, co-founder, Bubblebox.

The elusive millennial demographic has been hot on every digital marketer’s lips for years now. Heck, we even wrote an article about how to engage this so-called “highly influential” cohort. It seemed as if every brand worth their salt had joined the great race to target, capture and retain their piece of the “the selfie generation,” while swiftly pushing the parent demographic—the boomers— under the rug. I thought it might be interesting to write something to counter all of this millennial fervor—a think piece on how to engage the oft-ignored “boomer consumer.” But the more I read about demographic marketing, the more conflicting the findings seemed to be, and the more I realized that there really isn’t a consensus definition of any generation in our modern times. So I got to thinking: is demographic marketing dead?

If your company is in a very price-competitive industry segment, you are probably stuck on the promotion treadmill. On the promotion treadmill, every day is another set of promotions, you are forced to send emails more and more often to help make sales goals, and every email screams a discount. You're probably tired of hearing all the best-practice advocates telling you to jump off the treadmill and send lifecycle emails for engagement. Even if you think they have a point, that's not your decision to make. Your job is to move the needle on sales while still sending out the constant hail of promotions.

"You probably know by now that segmentation improves email marketing performance significantly, so if you’re still operating primarily in “batch and blast” mode it’s time to start slicing and dicing your subscriber file. Marketers that practice list segmentation see better open and click-through rates, fewer unsubscribes and better deliverability."

With almost 122,500,453,020 emails sent every hour in India, email is alive and here to stay for long. While marketers across the globe are embracing advanced personalization in email, India is leaving no stone unturned to win the email game.

Batch and Blast – the process of sending out email with little to no segmentation – has become the Tom Cruise of the email industry. Once white-hot popular, yet now almost comically reviled. You can’t pick up an entertainment magazine without a little Cruise-hate. You can’t pick up a marketing publication that doesn’t attempt to eviscerate BB and basically tell you that you’re a moron if you use it.

Last week, organic grocery giant Whole Foods announced its plans to open a low-cost grocery chain targeted at the millennial market. The concept, according to CEO Walter Robb, will be “unlike anything that currently exists in the marketplace,” boasting “a modern, streamlined design, innovative technology and a curated section.” In the same week, McDonald’s—in an attempt to boost its falling popularity with the twenty-something set, revived its Hamburglar mascot complete with a head-to-toe hipster makeover. With two major players joining the race to capture (and retain) their share of the millennial market, media outlets and marketing professionals alike have called into question the efficacy of their tactics. Why the skepticism? All too often companies miss the mark when it comes to millennial marketing, due in large part to the mass confusion surrounding how to engage this elusive yet highly influential group.

58% of people said they abandon because shipping costs increased the price too much. 57% said they wanted to get an idea of the price including shipping. 55% said they weren’t ready to purchase and wanted to save the basket for later! 50% said their order didn’t qualify for free shipping and 37% complained shipping costs were shown too late in the process.

Despite all the talk over here about the EU Data Protection Reform, with its unknown content and unknown timescales, we’ve been relatively calm and relaxed about the whole thing. After all, who has time to worry about something “12-24” months away when you have things which matter now?

"Personalization is under attack. Not the act of personalizing messages to be more relevant and valuable – just the word itself. A recent Buzzfeed article reports that brands like Walmart, Macys and Gap are eschewing the term "personalization" in favor of "relevancy." Why? There are a couple of reasons. First, with the amount of contextually relevant data now available to marketers, the term personalization seems dated, limited and even "invasive and robotic," according to the article. Second, brands are very aware of not crossing the line between relevant and creepy. "

Did you know that sometimes your users will open email on a mobile device? I know, it was a shock to me too. But here we are in 2015, and after at least 5 “the year(s) of mobile email”, we’ve mostly got past the idea that we have to at least do something to consider this.

There’s plenty of stats and reasons why mobile is important – we won’t focus on those here (though, for the record, it’s around 55% opening on mobile for the average audience). However I have seen a bit of misinformation and confusion around mobile email design lately, so I thought it’d be useful to look at the three main approaches to improve the experience for mobile users.

Spoiler alert: the best approach is to adopt all three.

Ever since the final session at EEC 2015, it’s been a seismic few weeks for the email community when it comes to understanding deliverability from the perspective of the inbox providers. In that session, a seemingly innocuous question from yours truly turned what would have been a worthy, but predictable panel on deliverability featuring 4 major inbox providers (AOL, Comcast, Gmail and Outlook.com) into one of the most controversial and talked about panels in the history of the EEC.

Download the 2015 MAAWG Sender Best Common Practices White Paper

"EEC15 proved that Dela and the people who have discovered that sending more results in higher sales - despite the misgivings of a large part of our email community – is absolutely right."

We need to talk about how we measure success when it comes to mobile email. The email experience today is miles apart from the one ten years ago – there are mobile phones, tablets (is that a mobile device or not?), watches, laptops – yet on the most part we are still using the same success metrics.

This isn’t going to be an article about design tips or how to add “the responsive code”.

Quick: What’s one thing everyone reading this article has in common (other than this article?) We all have a smartphone. Furthermore, I’m fairly certain we’ve all used a smartphone today, either to check email or go on the Internet or both. You might even be reading this on a smartphone. Smartphones and mobile devices have become so prevalent that you can’t walk down the street or into a restaurant without seeing one in use.

We know this as consumers. We live it every day at work and at home, with our colleagues and our families. But are we acting on this knowledge as marketers?

"The best tips I can give you this holiday season is to spur your creativity with example of past programs that did more than offered shopping experiences. Given it’s less than a month out, it’s still not too late to use your brand as the experience vs. selling products to augment the experience. Not everyone has a power brand like Tiffany’s. "