Data Prep & Segmentation

Complete every section in order before the warm-up ramp begins. The new subdomain has zero reputation — every signal it receives in the first two weeks is permanent. A clean list is the single highest-leverage lever available at migration. It costs nothing and cannot be undone once bad mail has left.

Rule of thumb: suppress chronically unengaged and likely-hard-bounce contacts before cutover, not after. Building subdomain reputation on bad signals guarantees a slow, painful ramp — or an immediate block.

Intelligent Golf export checklist

Work through each item with the club's Intelligent Golf administrator. Save export files as .csv with UTF-8 encoding and version-stamp the filename (e.g. highgate-export-2026-06-09).

Core contact data

Full name — first name and surname as separate fields where possible
Primary email address
Secondary / family email address (if stored — flag for deduplication review)
Phone number — for the one-off transition SMS only; do not import into a marketing workflow
Member number / account ID — used as the unique key during deduplication
Member status: current / lapsed / visitor / society / staff / committee — export as a distinct field, not a free-text note
Membership category (Full, Junior, Country, Life, Honorary, Social, Academy, Corporate, etc.)
Membership start date
Record acquisition date and source (online join form, paper form, third-party event, referral)

Custom fields — golf-specific

Handicap index or WHS reference number
Home-club flag (primary vs. associate member, if applicable)
Committee / role flag (captain, lady captain, president, secretary, manager, treasurer, etc.)
Communication preference field, if Intelligent Golf captures it
Any club-specific custom fields relevant to segmentation (locker number, buggy permit, society name)

Engagement data

Export engagement against the sending domain or address used in Intelligent Golf. Where Intelligent Golf does not offer an engagement export directly, request a report from their support team or extract from their analytics dashboard.

Opens — last 30 days: contacts who opened at least one email
Opens — last 31–60 days: opened in this window but not within the last 30 days
Opens — last 61–90 days: opened in this window but not within the last 60 days
Clicks — last 30 days
Clicks — last 31–60 days
Clicks — last 61–90 days
Replies — any period (a single reply is a strong positive signal; flag these contacts individually)
Contacts with zero measurable engagement and no attributable engagement window — your Tier D / Tier E population; see segmentation model below

Opens are unreliable. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches tracking pixels, inflating open rates by an estimated 40–50% for Apple Mail users. Do not treat an "open" record in Intelligent Golf as a confirmed human open — treat it as a weak signal of possible engagement. Clicks and replies are the only reliable positive signals. Use engagement data to tier contacts, but never over-weight opens when assessing list health or ramp readiness.

Suppression and compliance data

Unsubscribe / opt-out list — every contact who has ever opted out, regardless of when or why
Hard-bounce list — all addresses that have hard-bounced historically
Complaint history — any spam complaint records (feedback loop or manual) the club or Intelligent Golf holds
Consent evidence — for each contact or cohort, document the legal basis:
- Explicit email marketing consent with timestamp and source, if available
- Soft opt-in under PECR: data collected during a membership sale or negotiation, for similar products or services, with an opt-out offered at collection and in every subsequent message — all three conditions must be met
- Note on charitable soft opt-in: the extended basis in force from 5 February 2026 applies to registered charities only. A golf club must confirm its actual legal status before relying on those rules. Do not assume a membership organisation qualifies automatically.
- Contacts with no consent evidence and no documentable PECR soft opt-in basis → flag as Tier E (suppress before cutover)
Date of the most recent consent refresh, if the club has ever run a re-permission campaign

Email domain breakdown

Produce a domain-mix analysis of the cleaned list before the first send. This drives seed-panel prioritisation and inbox-placement diagnostics.

Count and percentage of Gmail addresses (@gmail.com)
Count and percentage of Microsoft addresses (@outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.co.uk, @msn.com)
Count and percentage of Apple / iCloud addresses (@icloud.com, @me.com, @mac.com)
Count and percentage of Yahoo / AOL addresses (@yahoo.co.uk, @yahoo.com, @aol.co.uk, etc.)
Count and percentage of corporate / custom domain addresses
Count and percentage of other / unknown providers
Flag any domains that look role-based or shared (e.g. @clubsecretary.co.uk) for the role-based scrub in the hygiene tasks below

If 60% of the list is Gmail, Gmail inbox placement is your primary diagnostic signal. Register the sending subdomain with Google Postmaster Tools on both the root domain and the subdomain before the first send.

Hygiene tasks

Complete all tasks before importing into GHL. Suppression imports must happen before any contact list import. GHL will honour existing suppressions if you import them first; if you import contacts first, a window exists where a suppressed address could receive mail.

#	Task	How to do it	Risk of skipping
H1	Import suppressions first	Export the full unsubscribe and opt-out list from Intelligent Golf. Import into GHL as a suppression list (DND / unsubscribe) before importing any contacts. Cross-reference complaint history and add those addresses too.	Suppressed contacts receive mail in GHL. A single complaint from a known opt-out is an immediate reputation signal and a potential PECR / UK GDPR breach.
H2	Purge historical hard bounces	Export the hard-bounce list. Remove every address from the contact import file. Do not import historical hard bounces into GHL at all — not even as suppressed contacts.	Hard-bounce addresses frequently become spam traps over time, particularly recycled Yahoo and Hotmail addresses. Sending to a trapped address can trigger a Spamhaus listing on the shared IP pool, affecting other senders on the same infrastructure. Hard bounce >2% pauses the ramp; >3% stops it entirely.
H3	Deduplication	Use member number / account ID as the unique key. Where the same email address appears under two member records, retain the most recent, actively consented record. Flag duplicate addresses (not just duplicate records) — one inbox receiving two copies of every email doubles the unsubscribe and complaint probability.	Inflated list size, doubled send volume against the warm-up budget, and increased unsubscribe and complaint rates from annoyed recipients.
H4	Role-based address scrub — with golf nuance	Suppress all addresses where the local part (before `@`) is a generic role indicator: `info`, `office`, `admin`, `enquiries`, `reception`, `bookings`, `hello`, `contact`, `mail`, `postmaster`, `webmaster`, `noreply`, `no-reply`. However, do not suppress golf-club stakeholder roles (`captain@`, `ladycaptain@`, `secretary@`, `manager@`, `president@`, `treasurer@`) without first verifying with the club that these are real, active, opted-in individuals. If confirmed, import them as regular contacts with the appropriate membership-category tag.	Sending to `info@` or `office@` typically reaches a shared mailbox monitored by multiple people, raising complaint probability. Suppressing a genuine `captain@` who actively manages club communications loses a key stakeholder. Getting this wrong in either direction causes problems.
H5	Family / shared address consolidation	Where Intelligent Golf holds multiple member records pointing to the same email address (e.g. a family membership where the partner email was re-used), collapse to a single contact. Tag the record with both member names or a `family` flag so the club understands why the record count reduced.	Two members at one inbox means two unsubscribe triggers from a single human action. One click of "unsubscribe" removes both records, which the club may not expect. Also inflates apparent list size and distorts per-contact engagement metrics.
H6	LC Email / GHL list validation	Run the cleaned list through LC Email's built-in validation before the first campaign. LC Email flags syntax errors, known-invalid MX records, and disposable domains. Remove all addresses that fail validation.	Invalid addresses generate hard bounces on first send. Even a handful of hard bounces from a cold domain will suppress Google Postmaster domain reputation before any positive signal has been built. Hard bounce threshold: >2% pauses scaling.
H7	Consent audit spot-check	For a random sample of 50–100 contacts, verify that consent evidence (opt-in timestamp, source, or documented soft opt-in basis) exists. If the club cannot evidence a legal basis for more than ~10% of the sample, escalate before proceeding — consider a re-permission campaign for the uncertain cohort rather than proceeding to a full ramp.	Sending to contacts without a documented legal basis is a PECR / UK GDPR risk. It also increases the likelihood that recipients have no recollection of the club's emails, raising complaint rates at exactly the moment when domain reputation is most fragile.
H8	Soft opt-in documentation	Where the club is relying on PECR soft opt-in, document in writing: (a) how each cohort's data was collected, (b) that the product or service is similar to what was offered at collection, (c) that an opt-out was offered at collection and appears in every email. File this documentation before launch.	Without documented evidence, the club cannot demonstrate compliance if challenged by the ICO. It cannot be retroactively reconstructed after a complaint. The club is the data controller; Albatross / Capture is the processor — the club bears the compliance burden.
H9	Corporate domain MX check	For corporate / custom domain addresses, run a quick MX check (use `mxtoolbox.com` or equivalent) on the top 10–20 corporate domains in the list. Confirm they have valid, live MX records.	Corporate domains can go dark (company closes, domain expires). Sending to a dead domain generates hard bounces and, if the domain has been acquired as a spam trap, potential blocklist exposure.

Tier A–E segmentation model

Apply segmentation after all hygiene tasks are complete. Every contact must land in exactly one tier. Import into GHL with a custom field or tag (warm_up_tier) so that ramp workflows can use tier as a trigger condition.

The engagement-gated ramp begins with Tier A on Day 1 and widens to lower tiers only when metrics remain in the green zone. See Ramp Schedule for the day-by-day progression.

Tier	Label	Criteria	Ramp approach	Notes
A	Engaged — recent	Clicked, replied, booked, or transacted within the last 30 days (prior to migration export date) — opens excluded (unreliable under Apple MPP)	Send first. Include from Day 1. These contacts generate the positive signals — replies, clicks, add-to-contacts actions — that anchor subdomain reputation from the outset.	Even with Apple MPP inflation, contacts with click or reply activity in this window are genuinely warm. Prioritise them. Tag: `tier_a`.
B	Engaged — moderate	Last measurable engagement (open, click, or reply) was 31–60 days ago; no engagement in the last 30 days	Introduce from Day 4–7, once Tier A sends are clean (no complaint spike, hard bounce <0.5%).	Likely still interested but slightly stale. The Trust Bridge transition email is a natural re-introduction. Tag: `tier_b`.
C	Engaged — stale	Last measurable engagement was 61–90 days ago; no activity in the last 60 days	Introduce from Day 8–14. Watch complaint and bounce rates carefully when adding this tier — signal quality drops here.	Consider a brief re-introduction line in the copy for this cohort ("You may not have heard from us in a while…"). Tag: `tier_c`.
D	Unengaged — legitimate relationship	No measurable engagement history (Intelligent Golf did not capture engagement, or member joined after the last send), but the contact has: (a) a verified current or recent membership, (b) a documented consent or soft opt-in basis, and (c) no prior bounce or complaint record	Introduce alongside Tier C (Day 8–14) or shortly after. Treat as a fresh subscriber — the Trust Bridge email is the first they receive and sets expectations.	Includes genuinely new members and members who simply never engaged with Intelligent Golf emails — plausible given the low send frequency at many clubs. Do not assume non-engagement equals no interest. Tag: `tier_d`.
E	Suppressed — hold back	Any contact matching one or more of: (a) last engagement more than 90 days ago; (b) prior hard bounce from any source; (c) prior spam complaint from any source; (d) no consent evidence and no documentable soft opt-in basis; (e) on the unsubscribe / opt-out list; (f) role-based address not verified as a real opted-in individual; (g) failed LC Email validation	Do not include in the ramp. Hold in GHL as suppressed / DND. Review after 60 days once reputation is established — re-permission campaign only, never a bulk send.	This is a controlled hold, not a permanent deletion. A Tier E contact can be re-engaged via explicit re-permission content once the domain has a clean track record. However, contacts inactive for 90+ days carry meaningfully higher complaint and bounce risk — only attempt with re-permission copy. Tag: `tier_e`.

Sunset policy for stale data

Any contact who has not engaged in 12 months or more and holds no active membership relationship should be considered for permanent removal, not just temporary suppression.
Before removing, confirm with the club whether the contact has an active account in the club management system (i.e., a paying member who simply does not open emails). If so, retain as Tier E and flag for a re-permission campaign.
If the contact is a lapsed member with no renewal in 12+ months, no consent refresh, and no engagement history: remove from the marketing list. Retain in the club management system for financial records if required — but do not send marketing email without a fresh opt-in.
Document the removal rationale and date for UK GDPR records purposes.

Pre-launch sign-off

Do not proceed to the warm-up ramp until every item below is checked. This list is the formal gate between data prep and the first send.

Part of the Albatross / Capture email migration SOP. See also Authentication Setup, Ramp Schedule, and Trust Bridge Templates.

Data Prep & Segmentation

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