Black Friday is a day of massive volumes for email globally, which puts pressure on every part of the sending infrastructure. All our accounts will be more active than usual, and all ISPs will take longer to deliver emails to the inbox, slowing down the responses.

As you are preparing your Black Friday campaigns, here is a brief summary of all the improvements that we have made in the backend since last year.

We have also prepared a list of best practices for you so that you can make the best of our industry-leading technology.

Last year our servers had 100% uptime during the Black Friday weekend (Friday November 24 through Monday November 27) and SAP Emarsys saw a 9% year-over-year increase in customer engagements.

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

This year we have prepared our systems to an average increase of 15% in the numbers and have carried out a lot of improvements to support this.

For those of you who do not get excited about the technical details, the short version is this: the Automation Center, segmentation, personalization, Web Channel, Interactions, Predict and Analytics, as well as the hardware all these services use have become faster, more reliable and more easily scalable.

For the more tech-savvy readers, here is a detailed (but not exhaustive) list of improvements:

• General improvements:
  • The network connections have been improved in our data centers
  • The MSDB database hardware has been updated to provide you with a more balanced batch email sending experience.
• Automation Center:
  • Segments are executed faster and in a more robust way in the Automation Center.
  • The default number of web servers used by our environments has been increased.
  • The API self-defense mechanism has been improved to protect the databases and web servers during peak load periods.
  • A new, lightweight method of fetching large contact lists via the API has been introduced.
• Interactions: You can use any segment types in the Segment, Exclude and Filter Switch node in Interactions.
• Email reporting: Domain reporting is now available in real time from the cloud.
• Relational Data:
  • The main Relational Data service has been moved to the cloud.
  • The API data onboarding service for Emarsys-hosted Relational Data databases has been moved to the cloud.
• SMS:
  • Delivery handling improvements have been made for the SMS service.
• Segmentation:
  • Most of the on-premise services have been moved to the cloud.
  • Batch contact segments are running in the cloud.
• Email:
  • Email attachments have been moved to the cloud.
  • Content modification steps have been improved in the editor to save time.
• Web Channel:
  • The way campaigns are started and stopped has been improved and become more reliable.
  • The performance of the personalized content refreshment has been improved.

As usual, our worldwide support teams are available 24/7, meaning someone is always there when you need them.

We strive to go above and beyond expectations every single time and our teams are available via email, phone, chat and the usual ticketing system.

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