# Draft — to Jennifer (she forwards the second half to Ben)

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## Part 1 — just for Jennifer

Jen,

Short answer to your question: yes, I can tag it, and it'd take me two minutes.
But please don't let Sam hit send Monday until Ben has seen the numbers below,
because the list he's built reaches about a third of the guests we could
actually be mailing for this sale.

I've written the rest so you can forward it straight on.

Rian

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## Part 2 — forwardable

Hi Ben,

I ran your 5,141 against our live Mailchimp audience this morning. Two things
came out of it, one good and one that I think changes the plan for Monday.

**The good:** 3,989 of your 5,141 (78%) are already active subscribers. Nothing
to import — I can tag those today and Sam can send to them Monday as scheduled.

**The part worth a look before Monday:** our Shore Club list in Mailchimp is
already 16,035 verified, actively-mailed subscribers. Your 5,141 is a subset of
it — 3,927 of your addresses are already in there. Which means sending to your
list instead of the full segment would leave **12,108 qualified Shore Club
guests out of a 72-hour 50%-off sale.**

I think that's just an artifact of the source. The rate-code filter (EX, EPK,
BK, WB, HRA) came off a productivity report of 9,234 records — that's a slice of
the guest base, not the whole mailable list. Nothing wrong with the filtering;
the starting pool was narrower than the one we already maintain.

On the 1,152 of yours that aren't in Mailchimp: they're mostly records created
before our 2024 cleanup, and the misspelled-domain rate in that group runs about
12x what we see in the verified list — things like "gmai.com" and "yshoo.com".
About 60 will hard-bounce on the first send. Your ZeroBounce instinct was the
right call; I'd like to run that group through verification and add whatever
passes.

One caution on the ".co → .com" repair — .co is a real domain ending, so a few
of those conversions produced addresses that don't exist or belong to someone
else. I found 10 in our own data and there are likely more in yours.

To your question about downside: unsubscribes are the harmless outcome. The ones
that cost us are hard bounces and spam complaints, which hit domain reputation —
and that reputation is shared across all four resorts' sends, not just this
campaign. It's also per-contact billing, so unverified addresses cost money
whether they're mailed or not.

**What I'd suggest for Monday:** send on schedule, but to the full Shore Club
segment — 16,035 instead of 5,141. I'll tag your list as "Flash Sale 2026" so we
can report on that cohort separately. Then I'll verify the 1,152 this week and
fold in whatever's real.

Happy to set this up either way — just say the word. And if you've got 15
minutes this week I'd like to give you the background on how this audience got
built; there's some history that'll make the next pull much faster.

Rian