Advice for if holiday sends aren't going well

First, be sure you know how to recognize a marketing problem from a deliverability one, and respond accordingly. If mail is bouncing, then that’s probably a deliverability problem. If it’s delivering but folks aren’t converting, then that points more towards a marketing issue. If you have Braze Deliverability Services, you can reach out to your consultant to ask for help. If you don’t have services, the Support team may be able to troubleshoot.

If mail is being rejected, reported or filtered as spam, or just isn’t getting the response you wanted, don’t cry! Have some cookies and milk, and pull out your backup plan. You do have one right?! It might be reducing your initial goals, switching gears and moving to another channel, or allowing more time to reach your targets, but before BFCM you should have some idea of what you’ll do if things aren’t panning out the way you hoped.

In most cases, you’ll need to pause sending while you recalibrate your content or segment conditions, and then resume sending at a lower volume while waiting for folks to engage, mitigating the damage. If you’re blocked at a particular mailbox provider, you can attempt to reach those users via another channel in the meantime. Even if you don’t use push, in-app, or SMS, you may have a social media or community following happy to hear from you. If so, you can ask them to check their spam folders and move your mail to the inbox, or to reply to your messages to help demonstrate additional positive user feedback. Most importantly, learn from the experience. Where did things go wrong, and how can you incorporate that into next year’s plans?