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How to Prepare Your Deliverability for the Peak Season (Black Friday & Christmas)

· 3 min read

The weeks leading up to Black Friday and Christmas are among the busiest of the year for email marketing campaigns. With a flood of promotional messages and heavy competition in users’ inboxes, solid deliverability becomes essential to ensure your emails land where they should: the primary inbox.
Here are the best practices to get your list and campaigns ready for the seasonal peak.

1. Warm Up Your Reputation Before the Rush​

Email providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) closely monitor your domain and IP reputation. If your sending volume spikes suddenly, the risk of ending up in the spam folder increases.

  • Gradual volume ramp-up: Start sending more frequently a few weeks before the peak, increasing progressively.
  • Focus on your most engaged users: Send first to those who open and click the most to send positive signals to providers.
  • Avoid “cold lists”: Don't reactivate all inactive contacts in bulk right before Black Friday.

2. Clean Your List in Advance​

A clean list is your best ally for deliverability. Removing problematic addresses reduces bounces and spam complaints.

  • Remove hard bounces and repeated soft bounces: Don’t leave this until the last minute.
  • Segment inactive users: Run re-engagement campaigns 1–2 months ahead. If they don’t respond, exclude them from peak mailings.
  • Validate email addresses with specialized tools: Better to invest now than compromise your reputation during the most profitable season.

3. Segment and Personalize to Beat the Competition​

When everyone is sending emails, content relevance becomes a key factor for engagement (and thus for deliverability).

  • Segment by recent activity: Target based on the last 30, 60, or 90 days of interactions.
  • Personalized offers: Use available data to create tailored content.
  • Test subject lines and content in advance: A/B testing in the weeks before helps identify what works best.

4. Manage Sending Frequency and Timing​

Sending too many emails in a short time can lead to unsubscribes and spam complaints.

  • Spread out campaigns: Plan a sequence that nurtures the user instead of a sudden blast of emails in just a few days.
  • Respect user preferences: If you have data on preferred frequency, follow it.
  • Leverage strategic moments: Beat the competition by sending at days and times when your audience is most likely to open.

Conclusion​

Being prepared for the peak season means protecting your reputation and maximizing returns from your campaigns. Warming up your domain, cleaning your list, segmenting intelligently, and carefully planning your sends are the actions that make the difference between landing in the inbox or in spam.
In a sea of promotions, the winners are those who land in the right place, with the right message, at the right time.