Managing Sequences Over Holidays

Managing Sequences Over 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. This guide helps you ensure you are sending your emails and executing tasks on the best days by respecting holidays.

Best Practice: Set Regional Schedules
If your team reaches out to different regions in the world, best practice is to set up region specific schedules. For example a dedicated schedule for US, Canada, EMEA, APAC, etc.

Automatically Excluding US Federal Holidays
Check the "Exclude Federal US holidays from schedule" box under Schedules. If you check this box, emails will not go out of on Federal US holidays. These dates include New Year's Day, MLK Day, President's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day.

Common Non-Federal US Holidays
Checking the ‘Exclude Federal US holidays from schedule’ from the schedule will ensure no emails go out on federally recognized holidays. However this does not include common work holidays such as the Friday after Thanksgiving, December 24th, or New Year’s Eve day. To accommodate for these scenarios we suggest these steps.

Let’s use Thanksgiving as an example. If you do not want emails to go out on Friday after Thanksgiving, you have two options:

• Temporarily remove the Friday time block from all US Schedules (Video Preview)
  • 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.
    • Navigate to Settings >Schedules and select the Schedule you want to adjust
    • Press X next to the Friday time block to remove it
    • Agree to reschedule all mailing
    • On Monday re-adjust the schedule by adding Friday back into the schedule
    • Repeat for all US Schedules
• Pause Prospects in Sequence States and resume on Monday (Video to Pause, Video to Resume)
  • 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.
    • Navigate to Settings >Sequence States > Select all Active Prospects
    • Filter by Sequencer or Owner if you need to pause only prospects sequenced or owned by specific users
    • Add a Tag, ex. Thanksgiving
    • Click gear icon and select ‘Pause’ to pause all prospects
    • On Monday, revisit Sequence States page and reactivate all paused Prospects with the Tag Thanksgiving by clicking the gear icon and selecting ‘Resume’

Holidays Outside the US
As noted above under Schedules settings Outreach has a handy option to exclude all Federal US holidays. However holidays vary across the globe and therefore this option would not apply if sending emails to other regions. To accommodate for other regions outside the US we suggest the following steps.

• Ensure you have separate schedules per dedicated regions. For example, a separate schedule for EMEA, APAC, US and Canada. See here how to set multiple Sequence Schedules.
• Add a regional calendar to your Google or Outlook calendar to be aware of local holidays (Video Preview).
• When a regional holidays is coming up, update the Sequence Schedule settings (Video Preview)
  • Navigate to Settings>Schedules and select the Schedule you want to adjust
  • Press X next to the day block to remove it from the schedule
  • Agree to reschedule all mailing (you will need to enter number of mailing to confirm)
  • After the holiday re-adjust the schedule by adding the removed day back into the schedule

Resources 

• How to Create an Outreach Sequence Schedule
• Set a Default Sequence Schedule