Holiday Marketing: How One Company Blew Up Their Email List on Thanksgiving (and not in a good way)

Welcome to the second week of 2023. We made it!

Today I’m gonna share a little story with you about something that happened with one of my clients in 2022. So, this client is B2C and they sell a product that people in a particular geography are very interested in. These people come to the company website, and sometimes learn they’re not eligible for this company’s product right away. So, they fill out a HubSpot form, they go into the client’s HubSpot CRM, and they sit there for several months in some cases, waiting to find out when they’ll become eligible for the product.

This past Thanksgiving, without telling me they were going to do this (because I would have told them “don’t do this”), they sent an email blast to a few thousand of the people who were not eligible for their product. The email basically said, “Happy Thanksgiving, we’re so thankful for you.” The button in the email, the call-to-action, sent them to the company website where these people found out they still weren’t eligible for the product.

You can imagine, if you put yourself in the shoes of the people who received the email, how frustrating it would be to get an email you haven’t heard from in months, and go to their website only to find out you still can’t get their product after you’ve filled out yet another form.

I’m sure you can guess what happened next. These people that the company was so thankful for: many of them unsubscribed from the email list, and that means this company can never email those people again. Those people are gone forever. So when the product does become available to them, they won’t know unless they come back to the website at a later date because maybe they saw an ad somewhere.

Yeah, this was a very big mistake on their part because it ended up being the biggest unsubscribe rate they received for the entire year. Up to this point, they had single-digit unsubscribes, which is the lowest I’ve ever seen from any company I’ve ever worked with. It’s really unheard of. They had a pristine list. The leads they lost could have converted into monthly recurring revenue and been huge opportunities for word-of-mouth referrals.

The lesson here is that whether you’re B2B or B2C, be very, very careful when sending holiday emails. There are still many holidays to come in 2023, so think long and hard before you send an email blast and possibly blow up part of your list. Make sure it’s absolutely necessary (like to announce office hours because it would actually impact your customers) and make sure your lists are properly segmented.

HubSpot makes list segmentation so easy for you! If you’re a HubSpot user, you can slice and dice your contacts in a million different ways based on the default and custom properties you’re using.

And make sure the messaging is right. Don’t just say “Happy Thanksgiving” or “Happy Valentine’s Day” or “Happy Labor Day”, just for the sake of saying it. People’s inboxes are getting flooded all the time. I unsubscribe from lists every day. It’s just exhausting to be inundated.

If you’re emailing your prospects and customers, it better be useful, educational, and interesting; they don’t want just another email in my inbox (would you?!). Make sure you are delighting them always.

If you’d like to discuss any of this, I would love to chat with you!