Overview
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 on Federal US holidays. For an official list of these holidays each year, see the US government's Office of Personnel Management's official page.
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, Christmas Eve (December 24), or New Year’s Eve (December 31). To accommodate for these scenarios we suggest these steps.
Example
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.
- Navigate to Settings >Schedules and select the Schedule you want to adjust.
- Click X next to the Friday time block to remove it.
test - Agree to reschedule all mailing.
- On Monday, re-adjust the schedule by adding Friday back in.
- Repeat for all US Schedules.
OPTION 2: Pause Prospects in 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.
- 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, e.g., Thanksgiving.
- Click the gear icon and select Pause to pause all prospects.
- 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
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 example)
- When a regional holidays is coming up, update the Sequence Schedule settings.
- Navigate to Settings>Schedules and select the Schedule you want to adjust.
- Click X next to the day block to remove it from the schedule.
- Agree to reschedule all mailing. (You will need to enter number of mailings to confirm.)
- After the holiday, re-adjust the schedule by adding the removed day back in.
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