Suppress Select Contacts for Smart Holiday Marketing

As we enter November, we are inevitably, rather undeniably, in the holiday season – a time when lots of retailers ramp their send frequency.

Understandably, increasing the number of sends to subscribers has some marketers concerned. How do we make sure to be in the game and aggressive enough, without turning off our customers and/or encountering deliverability issues?

One recommendation to consider this holiday season is suppressing contacts who have demonstrated a certain level of inactivity from some mailings.

Some ESPs enable you to see and segment those contacts who have not opened or clicked on 5, 10, 50, 100, 250 messages (and so on) in a row.


Contacts that have been ignoring your emails for a significant period of time should probably not get every single message on your holiday plan. Of course, you don’t want to suppress them completely, as they may be interested in your upcoming holiday offers and/or be seasonal shoppers.

• Take a good look at your holiday plan, identify your strongest offers and make sure that all contacts will receive these. Then, consider leaving those who have ignored your emails for a significant period of time off all of the reminders for the duration of the promotion.
• If you’re a retailer that normally sends twice a week and you’re ramping to 3-4 times a week for November and December, perhaps you email this highly inactive segment only once per week.
• We can even push contacts who have demonstrated inactivity within the holiday itself (maybe ignoring the last 5, 10 or 15 messages in a row) to a lowered cadence.

1. Protecting your deliverability - mailing to large quantities of unengaged contacts could affect your sender reputation and inbox delivery
2. Saving some marketing dollars
3. Better respecting and communicating with subscribers based on perceived interest.

What do you think? Would you be open to suppressing inactives from some mailings this holiday season? Or is this a tactic you believe would leave money on the table? I welcome your thoughts!

Kristen Gregory
Manager of Strategic Services