Managing high-volume emails this Black Friday with ZeptoMail

Black Friday officially kicks in the holiday shopping season of the year. It’s an exciting time for shoppers because they can explore bustling stores and find jaw-dropping deals both online and in-store.

As an eCommerce store owner, maintaining your website and a strong sender reputation is critical—especially during the holiday season when transactional email traffic surges. Handling high-volume emails, like during Black Friday, can be overwhelming. For instance, in 2023, 61 million shoppers purchased from Shopify vendors during Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone. Imagine the sheer volume of order confirmation emails sent in just four days.

Instead of feeling overwhelmed, be aware of the challenges of this busy season and uncover an affordable, efficient solution to tackle them.

The challenges of handling high-volume emails during Black Friday

Black Friday is a golden opportunity for businesses to engage customers and drive sales, but it also comes with unique challenges—especially when it comes to managing high-volume emails. Let’s take a closer look at the hurdles businesses encounter when handling high-volume transactional emails during Black Friday.

1. An email rush gone wrong

Black Friday is the time of the year where there is a sudden spike in your email sending volumes. For instance, if you typically send 10,000 transactional emails on regular days but ramp it up to 50,000 during Black Friday week, ISPs might flag this sudden surge as "spammy behavior." This email rush can significantly impact your email deliverability when you use a business mail service for sending transactional emails.

2. Shared infrastructure, shared problems

The infrastructure you use for transactional emails greatly impacts email deliverability. Many services use the same infrastructure for marketing and transactional emails. During Black Friday, promotional emails have a higher chance of being marked as spam by customers to declutter their inboxes. So, if you’re using a shared platform for both types of emails, recipient servers treat your IP addresses and servers as one entity. As a result, even your legitimate transactional emails risk being flagged as spam.

3. Maintaining sender reputation FOMO

Many businesses use shared IPs for transactional emails, which is fine on its own but it can be risky if the IPs aren't well maintained, especially during high-traffic times like Black Friday. It's like carpooling—If one person fails to pay, the others end up covering the cost. If you're sharing an IP with spammers or bad senders, it can hurt your sender reputation, too. To avoid this, choose a reliable email provider that has multiple mechanisms in place to filter out bad senders.

4. Black Friday or Bounce Friday?

Many business owners struggle with managing email bounces. If these aren’t handled properly, your sender reputation can take a hit. Frequent bounces might even lead to restrictions on your email account—which can take hours to resolve and get back on track.

5. Spam alert! Your email’s on lockdown

These days, advanced spam filters are lurking, ready to catch your emails. Remember, transactional emails aren’t like promotional ones, where you can throw in flashy words to grab attention during Black Friday. Going overboard with spammy language can backfire, hurting both your marketing and transactional email efforts.

6. Losing track of your emails

Amidst the Black Friday hustle, sometimes you may experience disappearing emails. This means you have no idea where your emails went. During times like these, you will wonder where your emails are—did they reach your customers, or are they stuck somewhere you don't know about. With the right tools, you can trace these emails easily so you can troubleshoot their delivery and ensure it doesn't happen again.

7. Compliance and security protocols have left the chat

You might be relying on an in-house solution to send your transactional emails. This can safeguard your data instead of using a third-party service. However, the real challenge becomes evident when your system doesn’t comply with country-specific security and compliance standards. This can harm both your business’s reputation and the deliverability of your emails

8. The struggle between fonts, colors, and devices is real

With the rush of online sales, it’s easy to skip testing your email templates. But if your templates aren’t optimized for mobile, your readers may be squinting to read, which isn’t great for your brand reputation. Sometimes templates may have broken images or bugs that also can affect the overall customer experience.

9. The support team is on snooze

Using certain email tools may lead to downtime during technical issues or when the technical support team is pretty unresponsive. While support is available, responses can be slower during Black Friday. To avoid the hassle, you'll need to choose a transactional email service you can rely on—even during the busiest seasons.

How does ZeptoMail support high-volume transactional email sending?

Zoho ZeptoMail was launched in 2020 with a focus on sending transactional emails. Its infrastructure is designed to manage high-volume email traffic efficiently on busy days like Black Friday. Let’s explore how ZeptoMail can be the ideal solution for handling your high-volume transactional email needs this holiday season.

1. A dedicated infrastructure for transactional emails

Zoho ZeptoMail has its own dedicated lane—a separate infrastructure designed solely for transactional emails. When you separate transactional emails from marketing emails, you can improve your email deliverability. Simultaneously, you'll experience fast delivery of emails to your customers' inboxes.

2. No email delays, less customer drama

Now imagine your customers’ frustration when crucial emails don’t arrive on time. Missing the right time to reach a recipient is like sending an invitation after the party has ended. ZeptoMail guarantees timely delivery with its dedicated infrastructure, trusted IPs, and robust email security protocols, ensuring that your emails land in inboxes right when they’re needed.

3. Divide and conquer with Mail Agents

ZeptoMail has Mail Agents to easily segregate and group your emails by type, purpose, app, and more. By dividing these emails, you can track them and get custom-made reports for each Mail Agent. With ZeptoMail, Black Friday high-volume emails can be easily grouped and analyzed while you continue to engage and conquer your customers' hearts.

4. Built to handle high-volumes like a pro

There are loads of transactional emails to send, especially during Black Friday. That’s where ZeptoMail comes in. You can send any number of transactional emails—unlike business email services—without any interruption if you stick to ZeptoMail's policies.  Right from checking MX records and maintaining sender reputation to performing security checks like DNS lookups, managing errors, and resending soft bounces at regular intervals, ZeptoMail has you covered.

5. Bounce back from bounces

ZeptoMail offers a feature called "bounce categories" that provides detailed insights into why your emails are bouncing. This information helps you identify and address these issues, allowing you to refine your email-sending process and prevent similar occurrences in the future. Instead of letting bounces hinder your progress, you can take control and optimize your email strategy to bounce back stronger this Black Friday.

6. Authentication checks before your emails take off

Clearing authentication checks at the ZeptoMail airport is essential for your emails to reach their intended recipients. Just like showing your flight ticket, passport, and clearing baggage checks, you’ll need to verify your domain by adding DKIM and CNAME records. Once validated, you’re all set to board—and your emails are ready to take off to the right destination.

7. Don't want to send emails to certain addresses anymore? Suppress them!

The ZeptoMail suppression list helps you manage addresses you no longer wish to send emails to or track. You can add them manually or automatically, including emails, domains, and tracking. ZeptoMail allows you to add up to 50 email addresses at once for seamless management.

8. Track every move with reports

ZeptoMail allows you to monitor opens, clicks, deliveries, soft and hard bounces, bounce categories, and failed processes. You get to access comprehensive reports and also generate custom reports to compare between Mail Agents. All of these reports are easily downloadable. You can also enable webhooks to monitor real-time customer activity.

9. Safe, secure, and stress-free

ZeptoMail's security-first approach ensures privacy and protection at every step. It offers encryption at rest, TLS for emails in transit, two-factor authentication, and customizable user access controls. With DKIM, DMARC, and IP restrictions, ZeptoMail keeps your emails safe from unauthorized access and malicious activity.

10. Plug-and-play with multiple integrations

ZeptoMail seamlessly connects with your application to send transactional emails effortlessly. It integrates easily with platforms like WordPress, Zapier, WooCommerce, Magento, Bubble.io, and other apps in the Zoho suite. By integrating with your application, you can deliver your transactional emails to your customers without any glitches.

11. Big dreams, small budget?

ZeptoMail is built for businesses of all sizes and keeps things budget-friendly with a credit-based system. You can send 10,000 emails for just $2.50—no monthly charges, no hidden costs, with 6 months' validity. Our pay-as-you-go pricing is the perfect fit whether you’re sending a few transactional emails at a smaller level or high-volume emails. You can do both within your budget.

Wrapping up

Black Friday can be chaotic, but managing your high-volume emails doesn't have to be. With ZeptoMail, you’ve got a reliable, scalable, and affordable solution to keep your transactional emails flowing smoothly. Whether it’s order confirmations, shipping updates, payment confirmations, or bounce management, ZeptoMail has your back.

So, this holiday season, focus on growing your business while we take care of your transactional emails.