Twice-a-month sends with a resend to non-openers beat twice-a-week blasts — and moving long-silent subscribers to a quiet tier, instead of deleting them, protects the deliverability everything else depends on. A true purge is rare: every five years or so, never a yearly ritual.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC — three DNS records that prove to Gmail and Outlook you’re allowed to send from your domain. Without them, receiving servers can’t tell you from someone pretending to be you, so they hedge: promotions tab, spam folder, silent deprioritization. Nothing reports an error — your ESP says “sent,” your dashboard says “delivered,” and you spend months rewriting subject lines to fix a problem that lives in your DNS. Your ESP has a page called something like “authenticate your domain”; add the records it gives you wherever your DNS lives, then verify it yourself by sending a test to a Gmail address and reading the message headers. Re-check quarterly and after any ESP change — rotated keys and updated return paths silently undo it. These rules have teeth now: Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders to pass all three, offer one-click unsubscribe and honor it within two days, and keep complaints under 0.3%; Gmail began rejecting non-compliant mail outright in November 2025, and Outlook.com applies the same authentication rules to high-volume senders. Your PMS and booking engine send as your domain too, so authenticate them alongside the ESP.
Every other week is the sweet spot for most vacation rental brands: enough presence to stay top-of-mind, little enough to stay welcome. Healthy lists at this cadence hold open rates in the high-20s.
Two to three days after each send, resend to people who didn’t open — different subject line, same content. It’s the cheapest reach multiplier in email and costs zero list goodwill.
The formats that consistently beat generic promos: a property-feature story (one quirky home, its story, its dates) and calendar releases — opening peak weeks to the email list before the OTAs get them. “Our list sees it first” is a reason to stay subscribed.
Sunset by tier, not by delete. Past guests never get deleted — one client’s past guest booked again a decade after their first stay, straight off the email list. Subscribers who have never stayed and haven’t clicked in 16–24 months (some families travel every other year) move to a quiet tier: your best few sends a year, not every campaign. Before anyone moves, send one honest “still want these?” email. Delete only what’s actually dead — hard bounces, spam complaints and unsubscribes, which your ESP should already suppress. A true purge of non-guest contacts who’ve sat untouched in the quiet tier for years is a rare event: every five years or so, not an annual ritual. Judge silence on clicks and site visits, not opens — privacy features fake opens for some readers and hide them for others.
If your popup offers monthly / twice-monthly / weekly (see Play 11), honor it here. Self-selected frequency is the strongest deliverability signal you can buy for free.
Unsubscribe rate is the cadence governor: monthly list churn creeping past 3–4% is the red flag to slow down, and a 1.5% unsubscribe spike on a single send is a hard brake. Keep spam complaints under 1 in 1,000 — that’s Gmail’s own target, not 1 in 100 — and above 3 in 1,000 Gmail and Yahoo can start refusing your mail outright. Register your domain in Google Postmaster Tools; it’s the only place you’ll see the rate Gmail is grading you on. Judge each send on clicks and revenue per send first, with opens in the 25–40% band as a rough check only, and track net list growth monthly. Revenue-per-send matters more than revenue-per-month — if halving volume holds revenue steady, you just doubled the list’s efficiency and its lifespan.
A “send me less” option in the footer converts annoyance into a preference instead of an unsubscribe. And for a list that’s gone 18 months dark, don’t blast it. Run a few weeks of low-budget Meta ads to the list first so your name is familiar, then send to the most recent 12 months of contacts and widen cohort by cohort only while complaints and unsubscribes stay healthy. Expect the first two or three sends to a revived list to run high on both — that’s the list telling you who left.
Pull your open-rate trend for the last 12 months. If the line points down, cut your cadence to twice a month starting now and set up the 24-month quiet tier this quarter.
This is the exact kind of work we do for vacation rental brands every day. Bring us the property mix and the market — we’ll bring the system.
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