The holiday season is creeping around the corner, and it’s one of the busiest times of year for marketers as they prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. When businesses are pressured by revenue goals, there is often a tendency to expand mailing lists and increase sending cadence. Below, I will address a few tips and recommendations to better optimize your marketing programs and strategies for the holiday season.

While growing up, my mom told me that when we first engage in a discussion with someone that we just meet, we listen to the person introducing themselves, we pay attention to what they say, and their body language. Then, we talk using empathy and relate to the person in a meaningful and sincere way.

When it comes to messaging and technology, it’s the same thing, and most of the digital messaging tools have been created with the idea of enabling interaction with a large number of people.

If you’re an #emailgeek, odds are good there’s a dream campaign you have rattling around in your head. It’s an idea you’ve probably had for awhile, but you just haven’t quite figured out how to execute it — Maybe you don’t have access to the tools you’d need, or you haven’t sold your team on it just yet. But one day, you hope to put it into action.

We wanted to hear those stories, so we put out a call to hear about your dream email campaigns, with a promise that our favorite would win a free ticket to the Litmus Live conference in San Francisco next month. We received many terrific, passionate entries from marketers who love the power of email, and have big ideas about what they can accomplish with it.

The result of years of planning and detailed work, MessageGears’ new drag-and-drop UI is the most powerful and user friendly platform on the market today.

For the marketer, it’s going to change the way they look at building both audiences and email campaigns, making the process more intuitive and visual. But it’s not just marketers who benefit from the enhanced technology. For the tech-savvy marketer or IT developer, it’s easier to climb under the hood and understand the inner workings of what’s going on with every email, as well has have the fine grain control you need.

Being proactive instead of merely reacting to every new technological advance in the industry is essential if you’re going to stay ahead of the competition and deliver the sorts of email experiences your customers are going to come to expect in the future. It’s always important to remember that you’re not marketing in a vacuum. Your subscribers’ inboxes are being flooded with marketing emails every day, from companies large and small. Some of them are going to take advantage of the latest technology, using machine learning, AI, or other cutting-edge tools in order to create sophisticated, highly personalized email campaigns. And once your customers get those emails, that’s the level of experience they’ll come to expect from everyone. You included.