Don't forget that although these pieces of advice refer primarily to this year's Black Friday, they are generally valid for all Holiday season campaigns and marketing activities.
The single most important advice we can give you with Black Friday approaching is to trust Emarsys.
We have built an infrastructure that saw a 9% year-over-year increase in customer engagements during the Black Friday weekend (Friday November 24 through Monday November 27) in 2023. Following are the year-over-year changes in channel volume:
- Overall Volume - 9% increase
- Email - 10% increase
- SMS - 35% increase
- In-app - 15% increase
- Web Push - 74% increase
You can read more on the details here. But in short: we are ready.
There are a few things you can do to make the journey even smoother for yourself, and give your emails the edge over all the others competing for inbox space.
These best practices will also make your segments, campaigns and Automation programs run quicker and even more reliably.
General advice for all channels
- Try to avoid big volume contact deletion.
- Start campaigns before Black Friday if possible.
Predict
- Don’t do a full product catalog update around the holidays.
- Do big product catalog uploads well before Black Friday
- Don’t do a full sales data upload during the peak days.
Automation (Interactions and Automation Center)
- Use batch/recurring programs instead of transactional ones, if possible. Transactional mails are for time critical messages. However, when setting up transactional mails you should consider that the following are not time critical emails:
- invoices
- refund emails
- password reset emails
- All segment types are available in Interactions. For this reason, we suggest reviewing your transactional programs and moving them from Automation Center to Interactions.
- Don't send transactional emails in large volumes.
- Please also bear in mind that batch emails cannot have any attachments to them.
- Try to make hourly batches for sendouts, e.g. 5000 emails/hour.
- Filters should always be followed by an action node.
- The Webhook node was designed for synchronizing contacts with an external solution. We strongly recommend against using this node for other use cases as it may lead to performance issues in your programs.
- Timer nodes are usually set to whole hours, so by setting your timers to other than whole hours, you can avoid congestion.
- If you want to send a follow-up email based on whether contacts did or did not open or click a previous message, include a wait of at least a couple of hours. This will give the ISPs time to deliver the first email, and give you a more reliable launch list.
Ad hoc email campaigns are faster to process than ones in Automation Center programs, so use them for time-critical emails.
- Make sure that in your block-based transactional email campaign you do not use block targeting.
- Use big volume campaigns and aim a bigger audience in one campaign instead of sending many small campaigns.
- Try to use less product personalizations this way the email generation and sending is faster.
- Try to avoid sending large emails.
- Send transactional emails only for real transactional use cases.
- If you are planning a bigger sendout than usual (10x), please contact Emarsys Support for extra advice.
- If your email message exceeds 100 Kbytes, let us know.
- Try to have not more than 30 tracked links in a message.
You can follow the progress of email generation using the new Campaign Launch Monitoring feature.
For more best practices, see the Get your email program ready for Black Friday page.
Segmentation
- Try to limit the number of criteria for the segments. Overusing behavior or geolocation criteria within a segment will lead to performance degradation. We suggest using not more than 30 criteria.
- Last year’s data show that the peak hours, between 6 AM and 10 AM CET, were very crowded you may want to avoid this time period.
- We suggest creating a single contact segment that contains combined criteria instead of combining contact segments.
- We recommend checking the Smart Insight Data Quality page and fix the errors to improve the quality of your Smart Insight segments.
Using the unsubscribe feature instead of segmenting on unsubscribe link clicks speeds up behavior segments.
Personalization and omnichannel vouchers
Personalization:
- Use only the personalization tokens provided by our personalization service on the Emarsys UI.
- Don’t use block targeting in transactional messages.
Omnichannel vouchers:
- Make sure your voucher pools are imported before the holiday season.
- Try to export data only after the peak periods of the holiday season.
Import
- Don't start using new import keys in the holiday season. Use the usual keys.
- Use manual or auto-import instead of API calls to avoid exceeding your rate limit.
- Avoid import of new contacts if possible, do the import well before the holiday season.
- Import files should not be too large or too small, either. The ideal size is around 1 GB.
- Do not start a new import within 10 minutes of the previous one.
- Avoid special fields: e.g. news letter, multichoice.
- Make sure to use duplication handling.
- Make sure not to import a large number of duplicates based on the key column.
Use "good" (a.k.a. fast) imports: make sure that the date format and columns format, count and order match properly.
Channels
- Don't base all your campaigns on email. Customers spend a lot of time online during this period so make use of our other channels such as push messages, SMS or CRM Ads.
- Campaigns without personalization and links are faster, especially during high traffic periods.
- Try to avoid peak hours (6 AM to 10 AM CET).
Use faster segments (i.e. with less criteria, avoid heavy usage of geo-location or behavior segmentation).
Web Channel
- Non-personalised campaigns that are aimed at all visitors are the fastest.
- In the peak hours, the Automation Center audience refresh can become slower than usual because of the high traffic.
- We recommend launching large campaigns before the peak periods of the holiday season.
- Try to avoid deleting large contact volumes around the peak periods of the holiday season.
- Try to avoid stopping or restarting Automation Center campaigns around the peak periods of the holiday season.
SMS
- Single SMS messages are faster.
- SMS messages without links are faster.
- SMS messages without personalization tend to be faster.
Mobile Push/Web Push/Inbox
- Messages without personalization are faster.
- Messages with small content sizes are faster.
- Avoid targeting contacts with not up-to-date push tokens.
- Upgrade the Android SDK and the integration to the new Mobile Engage Firebase authentication.
Smart Insight
- Please note that the daily upload limit to Smart Insight is 10 GB.
- Don't click the Load Data button too frequently (i.e. more than 2-3 times a day).
- Try to avoid modifying your Smart Insight configuration as it can cause delays in the uploads.
Loyalty
General best practices:
- Please be prepared for delays and slower periods in data processing.
- Make sure your sales data uploaded to Smart Insight passes all the validation checks required by Loyalty.
Time-critical best practices:
- Ensure you have performed all necessary changes before the holiday season (e.g. editing the tiers, fixed and additional benefits, vouchers, exclusive access, etc.).
- Try to avoid launching a new Loyalty plan during the holiday season.
- Make sure your voucher pools are refilled before the holiday season.
- Request the necessary Loyalty Wallet changes weeks before the holiday season.
- If you have just started to use Emarsys, we suggest completing the onboarding process well before the holiday season if you would like to use Loyalty during this period.
- Migrate your contacts, vouchers and points at least 1-2 weeks before the holiday season.
Best practices for campaigns, vouchers and Automation programs:
- Optimize your campaigns using Loyalty by targeting the correct segments and contacts (instead of targeting large volumes of contacts).
- We recommend splitting large campaigns into smaller ones and spreading campaign sending evenly.
- Check the validity dates of vouchers, actions and exclusive accesses.
- Try to avoid triggering the Loyalty node in Automation Center programs for a large volume of contacts (e.g. when sending vouchers from Automation Center programs).
- Check your Automation Center and Interactions programs and pause or freeze the ones that are not used (Loyalty can trigger a lot of these programs via external events).
Best practices for Relational Data:
- Ensure that your Relational Data queries are optimized.
- Avoid using Relational Data for personalization.
Loyalty Wallet best practices:
- If you are using your own Wallet and not the one provided by Loyalty, then make sure you only call the Redeem a contact's voucher API endpoint when contacts have enough points to redeem their vouchers.
Loyalty API best practices
- Make sure you are calling the correct Loyalty API endpoints with the appropriate HTTP methods and parameters.
- Try to optimize your Loyalty Contact API requests and avoid querying data that you will not use.
Relational Data
- Make sure you can handle the expected traffic (Relational Data and External Content).
- Ensure that the
DISTINCT
clauses are removed from your segment templates. - Try to avoid using data typeformatting functions (e.g. cast, convert, etc.) and order by clause for personalization as these significantly decrease performance. Order by clause in view may not work, we recommend using the ordering feature provided by Relational Data in this case.
- Check and improve query performance using SQL tuning methods, such as indexes, correct data types, checking execution plans, etc.
- Always use indexes on the key fields of the joins. Always use indexes on the reference fields.
API
- We suggest avoiding using a new key for the contact API requests during the holiday season.
- Monitor your response status codes and overall request numbers and try to avoid generating excessive API loads in general (e.g. too many request retries due to incorrect handling of failed requests, increasing number of status code 429 responses related to rate limits, etc.).
Miscellaneous
- In Reporting, note that it may take longer for data to show up on the screen during this period.
- When using the API for contact updates, use keys that you have tried out before (do not start experimenting with new one).
- Relational Data and External Content may slow you down, based on your actual implementation.