REDX Email Operations

I own the email infrastructure at REDX: weekly newsletters, targeted campaigns, promotional season campaigns, the segmentation rules engine behind all of them, and the campaign engine and outcome tracking that report what they did. Volume runs at roughly 800K sends a month against a database of over 100K contacts, at 95% delivery and a 3.2% bounce rate.

The rules engine produces mutually exclusive audiences, so a contact resolves to exactly one segment for a given send rather than qualifying for several at once. Segments are derived from customer data platform attributes rather than maintained by hand, which is what keeps them mutually exclusive as the underlying data moves. Promotional season campaigns are segmented on performance analytics from previous sends rather than on the calendar alone.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection fires opens that no person triggered, so a raw open count is a corrupted signal to build segments on. The platform reports human opens separately from machine-triggered ones, and the engagement tiers here are read against that figure rather than the gross number. Reporting is instrumented by email client, inbox provider, and open quality, per campaign and per newsletter, so a move in the number can be traced to where it came from instead of being explained after the fact.

List validation and deliverability monitoring run continuously, which is what holds the bounce rate at 3.2% on this volume. On a database this size deliverability is the constraint that quietly caps everything else, so it gets watched rather than checked. A/B tests run continuously alongside the regular schedule rather than as one-off exercises.