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Managing Sequences Over Holidays

Aye
Updated

Objective

Manage sequences over holidays to ensure you are sending your emails and executing tasks on the best days by respecting holidays.

The Outreach platform helps reps effectively reach out and communicate with Prospects and Customers by streamlining delivery schedules to maximize deliverability and increase open and reply rates. However, sending out an email or making a call on a holiday would likely not have a positive result. 

Applies To

  • Admins 
  • Users (sequence edit permissions required)

Procedure

If your team reaches out to different regions worldwide, the best practice is to set up region-specific schedules. For example a dedicated schedule for US, Canada, EMEA, APAC, etc.

Manually Adjust Time Blocks

If you prefer not to send emails during the holiday week such as the Friday after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve (December 24), or New Year’s Eve (December 31), we recommend these steps.

Let’s use Thanksgiving as an example (typically celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November). If you do not want emails to go out on Friday after Thanksgiving, you have two options:

OPTION 1: Temporarily remove the Friday time block from all US Schedules.

This is the best option for accounts with multiple teams in multiple countries, so you can easily adjust just the region-specific schedules. This also assumes that your team has dedicated schedules for each region.

  1. Log in to Outreach.
  2. Click on your initials in the left bottom corner, then click on Personal Settings. 
  3. Under Meetings, click on Calendar Scheduling. 
  4. Under Availability, click on F to remove the availability for Friday. 
  5. Click on Save and Agree to reschedule all mailing.
  6. On Monday, re-adjust the schedule by adding Friday back in.
  7. Repeat for all US Schedules.

OPTION 2: Pause Prospects in the Sequence States and resume on Monday.

This is the best option if users across regions are using the same schedule(s), making it hard to edit the schedule without affecting another region. This is also a preferable option if you have many schedules you would need to edit if you went with option 1.

  1. Log in to Outreach.
  2. Click on Administration (The Gear Icon)
  3. Under System Activity, Click on Sequence States.
  4. Select all Active Prospects, or filter by Sequencer or Owner if you need to pause only prospects sequenced or owned by specific users.
  5. Add a Tag, e.g., Thanksgiving.
  6. Click the ... Menu and select Pause to pause all prospects.
  7. On Monday, revisit the Sequence States page and reactivate all paused Prospects with the Tag Thanksgiving by clicking the gear icon and selecting Resume.

Holidays Outside the US

To accommodate for other regions outside the US we suggest the following steps.

  1. Ensure you have separate schedules per dedicated region. For example, a separate schedule for EMEA, APAC, US and Canada. See here how to set multiple Sequence Schedules.
  2. Add a regional calendar to your Google or Outlook calendar to be aware of local holidays.

Update Sequence Schedule for Regional Holidays

  1. Log in to Outreach.
  2. Click on Administration (The Gear Icon)
  3. Under Workflow Automations, click on Schedules.
  4. Select the Schedule you need to edit.
  5. Click on the day initial to remove it from the schedule, such as F for Friday, or M for Monday.
  6. Agree to reschedule all mailing. (You will need to enter number of mailings to confirm)
  7. After the holiday, re-adjust the schedule by adding the removed day back in.

Additional Resources 

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