Every fall, DMi has dozens of conversations with new and prospective clients trying to help them evaluate if they should launch a new marketing initiative in Q4 to try to boost their holiday revenue – or ride the status quo to avoid throwing a wrench into things in the most important time of the year.

There are different considerations to keep in mind for every channel when approaching this question. Let’s start with specific considerations for email marketing (we’ll tackle affiliate marketing in another post).

Here are the main considerations we recommend you use when weighing a Q4 email launch:

• Revenue is king. What this means from a Q4 perspective is that you should prioritize optimizations that will have the biggest potential impact to maximize revenue. This includes a strategic welcome series, abandon-cart emails, and post-purchase journeys. Our approach here is to A/B test new iterations to measure impact on incremental orders or higher average order value.

• You need an insurance policy. No matter how great you think a new initiative might be, it’s critical to maintain the control in your testing so you can easily revert all customers back to the original journeys at a moment’s notice. The last thing you want during the Q4 rush is to have to rebuild anything from scratch.

• If the automation isn’t broke, don’t fix it (yet). While journeys like welcome, cart abandonment, and post-purchase have the most potential revenue upside, they are all also essential marketing automations that customers expect to work seamlessly. Remember that any interruptions will create negative customer experiences during the most important time of year. If you change something, keep this risk in mind, and ask yourself one extra time or two if the upside is worth it.

• Some Q4 initiatives can pay off double in Q1. Immediate revenue impact is great; even better is immediate revenue impact that comes with a bonus of lasting impact beyond the holidays. A common example for our brands is testing out paid lead generation campaigns in Q4 while consumer engagement is high. This allows our brands to enter the new year with a replenished email list and insights into lead generation sources that they can leverage over the long term.

• Respect your team’s bandwidth. For most marketing teams, Q4 is the most bandwidth-intensive time of year. Taxing those teams with testing new initiatives at a time when they are already at capacity is obviously a no-no and won’t set you up for successful launches. For example, if you can tell that a send-time optimization project is distracting from the team’s ability to QA and deploy the existing promo emails, defer the send-time optimization initiative to Q1 to maximize bandwidth for the Q4 rush. That said, some members of the team may have more wiggle room. For instance, if there are members of the creative or web dev teams who front-load their work for the Q4 promo calendar, November and December could be a good time for them to finally tackle that new template refresh you’ve been putting off all year.

So should you launch that new initiative? Nobody loves “it depends” as an answer, but keeping those above considerations in mind will give you a great shot at choosing the right direction for your brand.