Campaign use case: Holiday campaign

Overview

Holiday sends are the biggest of the year, and the worst time to find a bad audience count or a missing suppression. This topic gives you a pre-holiday checklist for Redpoint Interaction (RPI), with links to the detailed topics for each task. Work through it a few weeks before your first holiday send, then build and test your campaign the same way you build any other RPI campaign (see Campaign use case: Welcome campaign).

Before you begin

• Know which channels and email service providers (ESPs) your holiday campaigns will use, and the planned send dates.

• Make sure you can create and edit selection rules, audiences, and interactions in RPI.

• Create the offers you plan to send. See Create an email offer.

Step 1: Check data quality

Your audience counts are only as good as the data behind them. Check quality early enough to fix problems at the source before your first send.

1. Confirm with your data team that holiday-critical data (for example, recent orders and new loyalty sign-ups) is loading into the database RPI selects from on schedule.

2. Test the selection rules your holiday audiences depend on, and compare the counts with what you expect. See Viewing selection rule counts: rule vs. audience designers.

3. Look for unexpected nulls or defaults in the attributes you use for personalization, such as first name or preferred store.

Step 2: Review suppressions

A missing suppression can result in sending a holiday offer to someone who opted out, so review every Suppressions block your holiday audiences use. The Suppressions block defines records that should never get a message, such as deceased individuals or people who have opted out. Any record that matches one of its selection rules is excluded when the audience runs.

1. Open each holiday audience in the Audience Designer.

2. On each Suppressions block, select Configure, then open the Suppressions tab.

3. Confirm the block includes every suppression your holiday sends need, for example:

   • Opt-outs and unsubscribes for each channel.

   • Deceased or otherwise do-not-contact records.

   • Recent purchasers of the promoted product, if you don't want to send them the same offer.

   • Holdout or control groups you're using to measure lift.

4. Select Open Latest Version to check each selection rule. Suppressions link to the latest saved version of a rule, so any rule edits apply automatically.

5. To add a suppression, select Add New Suppression. In the new row, enter a Name, choose a Selection Rule, and optionally set the Suppression Level.

6. Select Done to close the configuration window.

To learn more, refer to Create an audience.

Step 3: Confirm opt-in counts

Know how many records you can legally and safely contact on each channel before you commit to holiday volumes. A sudden drop usually points to a consent feed problem; a sudden spike may mean a suppression or consent rule isn't applied.

1. Build or reuse an audience that selects only opted-in records for each channel. A typical pattern is a Filter block for the business unit, a Filter block on opt-in status, and a Suppressions block.

2. Test the audience. On the toolbar, select Tests > Start New Test, keep Entire universe selected, and select Run test. The test opens in the Audience Instance Viewer, where you can review each block's counts. See Testing an audience.

3. Compare each channel's count with recent campaigns and with last year's holiday sends. Investigate large differences before you plan volumes.

4. Use separate Filter blocks for each criterion if you want to see the record count after each step.

If consent comes from an external consent management system (CMS), confirm that its latest data has reached the database RPI selects from. See Redpoint and consent management.

Step 4: Plan send capacity

Holiday volume stresses your ESP, your sender reputation, and your RPI environment at the same time. Plan for all three.

Check your ESP's limits and reputation

• Confirm rate limits, batch sizes, and any daily caps with each ESP, and make sure your channel settings match. For example, the SendGrid channel's Max send batch size sets how many recipients RPI sends to SendGrid at a time (1,000 by default). See your provider's page under RPI channels, such as SendGrid Email.

• If you're sending from a new ESP, IP, or domain, or sending far more than usual, ramp up volume gradually. Supporting email ramp-up in RPI shows how to split an audience by day and add delays between offers.

• Send to your most engaged recipients first, and avoid long-inactive addresses in your largest sends.

Schedule and prioritize interactions

• Stagger scheduled triggers so large interactions don't all start at the same time.

• On each trigger's Prioritization tab, set time-critical holiday sends to a higher priority than routine work. Normal activities run ahead of Low ones, and Urgent activities skip the queue. Prioritization takes effect only when your RPI administrator turns on workflow prioritization for the cluster (it's off by default).

• Use batch limits to pause a batch audience that's larger than expected, so you can review it before it sends. On the batch audience activity, set Maximum Batch Limit (and Minimum Batch Limit if a small batch would also signal a problem).

• Set a Targeted warning threshold on each channel you use for holiday sends. Any activity that selects more records than the threshold pauses and sends an alert, so you can confirm the count before you resume it.

• Ask your RPI administrator to review the cluster's Workflow Prioritization Options in the Deployment Service: Maximum Concurrent Workflow Activities (100 by default, applied to each tenant) and Maximum Time Activities Can Queue (1 day by default).

For details, see Interaction Designer: Interaction execution.

Check environment scaling (administrators)

• Self-hosted: review scaling for the Execution Service and Node Manager. If you’re using auto-scaling with KEDA, scaling should be automatic. If you’re manually scaling, confirm that the expected increase in demand stays within your cluster's node capacity and tune as needed before peak season. Refer to Scaling configuration in RPI v7 and Troubleshooting performance issues.

• Redpoint-hosted: reach out to your Redpoint contact to discuss how your environment is configured and whether any manual scaling is required before increasing send volumes.

Step 5: Build and test your holiday campaign

Build the campaign with the same selection rule, audience, and interaction steps in Campaign use case: Welcome campaign. For holiday sends, also do the following:

1. Selection rule: target the holiday segment, for example, past holiday purchasers or loyalty members with recent activity. See Create a standard selection rule.

2. Audience: connect a Suppressions block to your Filter block with the suppressions from Step 2. See Create an audience.

3. Interaction: use a scheduled or recurring trigger instead of a manual one so each send goes out at the planned time, and set its priority. See Create an interaction.

4. Test: select Activate in Test. Test mode writes results to sandbox offer history tables and doesn't fulfill offers, so no emails or messages are sent. Data extract offers produce files in Test mode only when Create exports in Test mode is selected. Select Results on the toolbar to review the counts, and edit and retest as needed.

5. Launch: when the counts look right, select Activate in Production. After a production run completes, you can't activate that workflow again until you roll it back, so finish testing first.

While the campaign runs, monitor activity statuses and results bubbles in the Interaction Designer. If something looks wrong, you can pause or stop the workflow. You can reactivate a stopped workflow, but every activity runs again, including those that already completed. See Pausing and stopping interactions.

Holiday readiness checklist

Use this table as a quick reference once you've worked through the steps above.

Additional resources

• Campaign use case: Welcome campaign

• Create an audience

• Testing an audience

• Interaction Designer: Interaction execution

• Scaling configuration in RPI v7

• Redpoint and consent management

Last updated: November 02, 2026