Email sending for Black Friday and winter holiday - best practices

If you’re using Intercom to market to your customers, you’re probably in the middle of building out email campaigns for Black Friday and the holidays right about now!

I’d like to share some tips with you, from our Trust & Safety team, on how to best manage your email sending for these campaigns, minimise bounces/spam complaints and ensure the best inbox placement.

Only message active customers

When sending email messages, it’s never a good idea to message every single one of your customers at once. Some customers have disengaged and their email addresses may no longer exist or, even worse, be used as spam traps. You could also have former customers who don’t want to hear from you any more, and might mark your emails as spam. Here’s more guidance on how to avoid spam traps.

We recommend that you only message customers who match the audience rule Last seen less than 180 days ago.

Only email when you have permission to do so

This one should go without saying, but please make sure you’re only messaging customers who’ve given you their permission to receive marketing emails from you (you should be implementing double opt-in on sign-up and all of your customers should have the option to unsubscribe from marketing emails).

In many markets, it’s a legal requirement for you to do so (for example, with GDPR legislation in the European Union or the CCPA in California) and we require that you do so as part of Intercom’s email sending guidelines.

Send your messages in batches instead of all at once

Sending your messages in batches is good practice for two main reasons.

The first is that sending a large amount of emails, all in one go, runs the risk of triggering our email safety alarms, which may result in your sending being restricted while our team performs a manual review - the last thing you want when you need to get those emails out on time.

Secondly, sending your email in batches allows you to compare performance between different groups of customers, and gauge which group is responding best to your emails.

You can read more about segmenting your users for email sending here.

That’s all from me, but feel free to reply here with any questions you might have!