Playbooks · 5 min read
The Diwali Template Still Running in February: A Teardown
Somebody DMs you in the second week of February. They found an old reel, they liked the earrings, they commented PRICE.
They get back: "Diwali offer live! Order by the 28th for delivery before Diwali 🪔 DM us DIWALI for the code."
Nobody meant for that to happen. The person who built it left, or got busy, or reasonably assumed that a campaign called Diwali would stop being sent after Diwali. It did not, because nothing stops on its own. An automation is a standing instruction and it runs until somebody switches it off.
This post is the switch-off. It is the least interesting part of a seasonal playbook and the only part that determines whether the playbook survives a year.
Why seasonal is worse than one-off
An event fails loudly, the same weekend, in front of people who were there. Seasonal campaigns fail quietly, four months later, to a stranger who now thinks your brand is dormant or sloppy.
Three properties make it worse:
The post keeps working. A good Diwali reel keeps getting saves and shares into January. The seven-day comment window means anything commented today is answerable today, regardless of when the post went up. The automation does not know it is February.
Last year's build is still sitting there. So next season you edit it instead of rebuilding it, and you inherit every stale sentence you did not read carefully.
The keyword is generic enough to catch strays. OFFER, SALE, CODE. Those words are typed all year by people who have never heard of your campaign.
The teardown, as a checklist
Do this on a named date, with a named person, written into the campaign brief at the top rather than the bottom. The teardown is scheduled before the launch or it does not happen.
- Export the leads first. Everyone captured during the campaign, as a CSV. There is no CRM sync and no integration, so if this data has anywhere to go, it goes as a downloaded file. Do this before touching anything else, because it is the one irreversible step if you get tidying-up enthusiasm.
- Switch the campaign automations off — all of them. Not the ones you remember. Open the list and go down it. Anything scoped to a seasonal post is off.
- Read the last week of Activity. What was still firing? What was getting blocked and why? A cluster of
POLICY.WINDOW_CLOSEDon a campaign post is normal; a healthy count of sends three days after the sale ended is not. - Delete the campaign keywords from the evergreen automations. This is the step people miss. If you added
DIWALIto your general price automation "just so it catches everything", it is still there. - Re-read every evergreen template you touched during the season. Discount lines get pasted into permanent templates under pressure. Find them.
- Write down what to change next year, now. Which keyword nobody typed, which question came up forty times and had no template, what the negative keyword list should have contained. In eleven months you will not remember any of it.
The rule the teardown enforces
Any sentence containing a date, a price, a deadline, a discount or a stock claim belongs to a campaign automation, never an evergreen one.
Keep the two sets physically separate. Evergreen automations answer where you ship, what the material is, how long delivery takes. Campaign automations answer everything with an expiry. When the campaign ends you turn off a set, and no permanent template needed editing, so no permanent template got broken.
The keyword problem in Indian seasonal campaigns
Two things about matching, both practical.
Matching folds case and punctuation, so Diwali? and diwali are the same thing. It also folds Latin accents. That covers most of what you need for Roman-script keywords.
It does not fold Indic vowel signs. If you set a Devanagari keyword, it matches the exact letters. दाम and दम are different words to the matcher, and so are दिवाली and दीवाली. Neither one is a typo forgiven for you.
So list the spellings people actually type, all of them, in both scripts if your audience mixes: diwali, deepavali, dipawali, दिवाली, दीवाली. The same applies to every festival with a contested romanisation, which is most of them. Ten seconds of listing at build time beats a customer whose comment matched nothing. The localisation post goes further into this.
What is honest about seasonal automation
Templated replies are free and unlimited, which is what makes campaign automation reasonable at peak. Your busiest week costs nothing extra unless you ask the AI to write something new, at one credit per reply. Free tier is 100 credits with no card, packs from ₹499.
What it does not do: it does not schedule or publish anything, so nothing here launches your campaign. No countdown, no broadcast to last year's buyers, no nurture sequence. The DM window is twenty-four hours and restarts only when they message you, so the "sale ends tonight" reminder does not exist as a feature and cannot. No WhatsApp. Official Instagram Graph API only.
And it does not stop itself. That is the whole post.
Before you launch the next one
Two dates in the brief: the go-live and the teardown. A name against each. And a habit of opening Activity once in the off-season, because a zombie campaign is visible there weeks before a customer finds it.
The event version of this problem is the sharper, same-weekend case and worth reading alongside. The mistakes post collects the other ways a good setup rots, and the India playbook covers the seasonal calendar this all runs against.
