Holiday 2025: Your Guide to Winning the Email Inbox

Email is still one of the highest-performing channels during the holidays but in 2025, standing out in the inbox will take more than engaging subject lines and steep offers. With shopping starting earlier, consumers expecting more personalization, and inboxes more competitive than ever, brands need to treat email as a performance channel, not a complementary touchpoint. 

Read our full report on the 5 Factors Reshaping Holiday 2025 to see how these email tips fit into a unified, cross-channel strategy.

Timing & Preparation

• Start Holiday Outreach Early: Begin in October with emails showcasing gift ideas, trending products, and ways to prepare for the season. This early engagement boosts awareness before inbox competition peaks in November.
• Launch Reactivation Campaigns Early: In October, target dormant subscribers with personalized offers to re-engage them before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• Prepare Backup Emails: Have contingency emails ready with discounts, flash sales, or time-sensitive offers to deploy if a campaign underperforms. Planning these early gives your team flexibility to pivot quickly and still hit your holiday sales goals.

Creative & Personalization

• AI Product Recommendations: Leverage the AI features built directly into your ESP or ecommerce platform to tailor product suggestions based on customer’s browsing or purchase history, boosting relevance and average order value (AOV).
• Gift Guides and Wishlists: Use email to make holiday shopping easier with curated gift guides organized by price point, recipient, or category. Include clear calls-to-action (CTAs) so customers can save items or add them to a wishlist, helping capture purchase intent early.
• Dynamic Content: Start using dynamic content blocks in emails starting in early October. This gives your ESP time to learn from browsing and purchase behavior, so by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, product recommendations and seasonal messaging are fully optimized.

Audience Segmentation & Send Optimization

• Predictive Segmentation: Use your ESP’s predictive segmentation and send-time optimization features to reach customers when they are most likely to engage. These tools learn from customer behavior and adjust as patterns shift through November and December.
• Suppress Recent Purchasers: During the holiday season, exclude customers who’ve purchased in the last 3–5 days from promotional emails. This prevents repetitive messaging and a poor customer experience.
• Holdout Groups: Create holdout groups to measure the true incremental impact of your holiday campaigns and drive future optimizations.
  • Pro Tip: For a holdout group to be effective, it should be random, representative of your target audience, and small (between 5–10% of the campaign’s audience size).

Promotion Support

• Avoid Conflicting Offers: Temporarily disable automated flows that conflict with active promotions to avoid confusing your audience. However, keep high-intent flows like cart and browse abandonment active since these messages recover high-intent shoppers.
• Test Offers: Use email to test bundles, loyalty perks, or discounts across segments, and track which drive the most engagement and conversions to identify your top offers.

Preparing early for the holiday season with proactive messaging, strategic segmentation, and relevant content ensures that your emails are engaging and impactful. With a robust email marketing strategy in place, you’ll be well-prepared to meet your holiday sales goals and deliver a seamless experience to your customers. 

Our expert Lifecycle Team is offering a free email or SMS audit to ensure your brand effectively nurtures customers acquired during the holiday season. Send an email to hello@within.co to request yours.

 

Author
Carla Donahue, Lifecycle Director