For marketers and businesses in general, peak season is where the energy goes. 

Online content, resources, and advice tend to be centered around helping teams squeeze out every ounce of success possible from the busy season, which is important and necessary.

But just as there’s a peak season for all, there is also an off-season.

That could look like:

• The lull after a peak purchasing season

• The two weeks of every year when your customers are all on holiday

• The unraveling of a marketing department due to internal role changes

• A season of administrative priorities for small businesses or entrepreneurs

For email specifically, it is any significant period of time without regular email communications with your subscribers

Why is this important to include within the definition of "off-season?" 

Off-seasons have the potential of sabotaging your inboxing experience and erasing all of the email momentum you had built up to that point. 

The consequences of "off-season” for email deliverability

Sadly, an environment of messaging abuse and misuse has caused mailbox providers to tighten the requirements that help them identify the good senders from the bad.

These changes require consistent, healthy traffic to maintain a strong reputation and visibility. Otherwise, marketers are prone to many issues once they come back around to sending again.

Issues that include:

Reputation relapse

Mailbox providers utilize consistent sending patterns to build and maintain reputation identification for senders. 

This type of reputation storage has a short shelf life, with some providers like Gmail abandoning reputation data after ~30 days without significant traffic.

This means rebuilding reputation, sometimes, if too much time passes without traffic, from the ground up. Not ideal to have to do every year.

Forgetful subscribers becoming complainers

Your subscribers are receiving tons of emails every day. A lack of regular visibility can cause some forgetfulness from subscribers…sometimes even to the point that they assume they’ve earned this break by unsubscribing from your emails.

So what happens when you start showing up in the inbox again?

You run the risk of being marked as spam by subscribers who mistakenly think you’ve re-subscribed them without their permission. 

TL;DR: off-seasons in email can cause higher spam complaints once they end.

Old unengaged addresses become spam traps

Every marketer’s list contains (at least a few) addresses that are the recipient’s junk email. It’s a rarely-if-ever monitored mailbox that is largely untouched. 

At some point in time, this general inactivity can cause the mailbox provider to decide to deactivate that email address account proactively. This can cause a hard bounce that is not ideal for your email reputation when happening in bulk, but something even more problematic can occur with this mailbox.

Sometimes the mailbox can be taken from the user and converted into what’s called a “recycled spam trap” that the mailbox provider will then use to obtain certain negative reputation signals.

If too many negative signals are present at that point, sending to these addresses can cause serious deliverability problems.

Losing the attention of your most active subscribers

On top of these hurdles, you can lose your momentum with your subscribers.

Sending regularly and earning regular engagements with them can create a history and habit that further feeds strong engagement activities in the future.

By entering an off-season of no contact with subscribers, you can ruin the momentum of engagement you’ve created and even struggle to re-warm these now cold subscribers once you are ready to send again. 

Best email practices for navigating the off-season

So what can you do to help bridge the gap for these slower contact seasons moving forward?

Maintain twice a month bulk sending minimum

Set up content formats that allow regular communication at least twice a month to your active audience, preferably maintaining >10k volume with each send where possible. (Think product announcements, newsletters, blog releases, specials, etc.)

Create more automated nurture flows 

Create more interest-nurturing content that is triggered based on subscriber activities in relationship with your business, whether that’s web page visits, email engagements, and more. These behavioral data points are opportunities to send more hyper-relevant emails.

Set up subscriber lifecycle check-ins

Build an automated sequence that engages with subscribers at particular intervals in their lifecycle to make sure preferences are up to date and long-term unengaged subscribers are automatically removed from future comms before they cause a problem. This email preferences update template is a great place to start.

Review and maintain your email system

Use the off-season to review current setups for maintenance purposes, and to help you understand opportunities for strategic growth in the future.

Many automated flows can feel set and forget, but it is important to make sure you are regularly checking that all are functioning as they should. 

Changes in integrations or updates internally for your business can cause things to break or content to become irrelevant, which can easily sabotage your email engagements—whether through a lack of sending or an appearance of lack of care for your subscribers’ experience.

What to do if you’re already at the end of an off-season lull

Restoring your email reputation after such lulls is doable, but it requires specific actions.

1. If it’s been more than three months for most subscribers, run your audience through an email address validation tool

   1. This will help remove some bouncing addresses that could make this process more difficult

2. Remove the long-term unengaged (> 12-month non-openers) from sends

   1. You can look at possibly re-engaging some of these in the future once you have warmed back up to your normal traffic, but I will still advise being careful of doing so with these

3. If it’s been more than 30 days, ramp up your bulk campaigns as if warming your domain for the first time all over again

   1. Start at 500-1,000 per day and double each day until total volume max is reached

Bonus: Off-season is your opportunity for growth

Once you have the above necessities in place, your email strategy should be self-sustaining through the off-season, but how about opportunities to grow beyond maintaining during the off-season? 

Where can you begin to look for opportunities for growth?

• Use the time in the slow season to brainstorm new strategies, content opportunities, and meaningful connection points with your audience

• Learn new tools that already exist in your tech stack that can up your email game

• Upgrade content presentation with visually stimulating and cutting-edge email designs that truly evoke the tone and excitement your content deserves

Turn your downtime into one of your most productive and peak-season-feeding seasons. You will thank yourself later.