Important Email Reminders For Luminate Online

By Rachel Shields & Kathryn Hall
With the holiday giving season kicking off and #GivingTuesday right around the corner, we wanted to provide you with some Luminate email pointers to help ensure your year-end efforts are successful. 

1.     Schedule your send as far in advance as possible: Everyone wants to send on November 28th and December 31st.

• Schedule all of your messages at least 24 hours ahead of send time, and once they're scheduled, try not to cancel.  
• Bonus points: Schedule sends for “odd” times IE:  9:10 AM CST.  Please see the Resource Center for more tips and tricks as well as our email terms of use

2.     Warm up your list ahead of time:
If you plan to send to a larger-than-normal target audience, start sending messages to those addresses ahead of #GivingTuesday and December 31st. Including these constituents in campaigns prior to your year-end campaign ensures they’re known addresses and can help increase deliverability and protect your sender reputation. 

3.     Make sure your email list is clean:
This should be an on-going process year round, but is most important at end of year when bad addresses can influence your sender reputation. Read up on the latest email deliverability best practices, including list hygiene and spam trap avoidance! 

4.     Site Performance Enhancements:
Strongly consider taking steps to enhance site performance during your year-end campaign send(s).  Some best practices to adopt: 

• Disable the "Rebuilding Groups" functionality for groups that aren't in use. https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/65549
• Avoid nesting non-static groups. Having a query based group where the query references other non-static groups can cause extremely high group rebuild times. https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/65549

5.     Pre-GivingTuesday and December 31st testing:
Test in advance of the big email sending days to avoid hiccups and leverage your findings in Giving Tuesday and December 31st mailings. 

• A/B testing is NOT recommended on peak send dates like December 31st. Since all messages should be scheduled at least 24 hours in advance, plan to do your A/B testing in the weeks prior so you can use the results to your advantage.
• Preview and test your email messages before you schedule and send. Ensure that test emails contain the same info as your main message and avoid blank message sends.

For more details on Luminate Email best practices check out the Luminate Email Deliverability FAQs 

We are grateful for each of you this holiday season and we wish you all the very best!