Tips to Ensure EOY Email Success in Luminate Online

As you prepare for #GivingTuesday and the end-of-year giving season, we wanted to provide you with some Luminate Online email pointers to help ensure your year-end efforts are successful.

1. Avoid email rush hours & spam complaints
Last year we saw big clumps of emails going out at the top of the hour, especially during prime sending times like 8 a.m., 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Eastern. 

• Schedule sends for “odd” times (i.e. 9:20 AM CST). The email will process more quickly, and it eliminates congestion. It’ll also help to separate your message from those of all the other bulk email senders across the world also sending at peak times.  
• Top of hour and bottom of hour are high send times.
• Think of your own inbox on Giving Tuesday this year. You were more likely to look at the ones that came in on their own, than ones that came in a group of 20.

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

• Avoid sending to people who have already donated during the campaign by sending your emails immediately (vs. scheduling them) when you're sending multiple emails in one day, to ensure you have the most up-to-date audiences. Review this blog post to understand some best practices to ensure your groups are up-to-date.
   
• Disable the "Rebuilding Groups" functionality for groups that aren't in use. Details can be found in this Knowledgebase Article: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/65549.
   
• Create Groups by domain (@gmail.com; @yahoo.com, etc) in advance and run the Group Performance Report on these domains so you can easily monitor your performance across domains.
   
• Avoid nesting rebuildable groups. Having a query-based group where the query references other rebuildable groups can cause extremely high group rebuild times: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/65549 
   
• Only send to your engaged housefile. Don’t impact your deliverability. If you decide to open the flood gates at the end of the year your email deliverability will suffer. If your  organization is forcing you to send to disengaged constituents, send to this segment on a separate day or at the end of the day so it doesn’t impact your inbox placement for those engaged constituents who are more likely to contribute to your campaign.

3. Smaller email sends correlate greater returns
Avoid sending emails to your full house file. Instead, send more, targeted campaigns. We’ve seen a correlation between more targeted messages and better revenue from email overall.
 
4. 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!
 
5. Pre-December 31st testing
Test in advance of the big email sending days to avoid hiccups and leverage your findings in December 31st mailings.  

•  A/B testing is NOT recommended on peak send dates like GivingTuesday and December 31st. 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.  Join us for our upcoming session, Top Tips for Email Segmenting, Scheduling, and Sending on Wednesday, November 4 at 1 p.m. ET where we’ll share specific queries to help you efficiently segment your groups for your end-of-year fundraising campaign. Hope to see you there.