Need ability to throttle email sends

[Anonymous]

We have a large database, and we need to throttle the amount of emails sent during a particular timeframe (e.g., 24 hours) so they are not delivered all at the same time. We also need the ability to define the number of emails a particular contact receives during a specific time period (e.g., 1 email per day, 3 emails per week, 5 emails per quarter, etc.).

We running into servers blocking our emails because we are sending too many at once, and we are also experiencing issues with particular contacts receiving far too many emails because the qualify for too many campaigns.

These are standard features of most email service provider platforms. We need them here, too!

Regards,
Susan

[Anonymous]

Susan,

With Marketo smart campaigns this is under your control, with a combination of smartlists, "random sample", "waitsteps"  . We do have qualification rules to define how often leads can qualify for a campaign at your command, so if you have a campaign reviewing a set of leads for changes; you can set the campaign triggering on those changes only to allow a lead to process through within or outside a time period.

Don

[Anonymous]

Hi Susan,

I have set up suppression lists for a couple of clients of mine in the past.

What it would look like for your Suppressions:
1 Email Per Day
SMART LIST:
Trigger Sent Email

FLOW:
Change Data Value Marketing Suspended to True
Wait 24 Hours (3 days, 1 week, etc. can be interchangeable)
Change Data Value Marketing Suspended to False

Schedule:
Active

What are the caveats with this?
If you have a variety of nurturing campaigns going and you set your suppression to 7 days.  Someone might receive Email 1, be suspended for Email 2, and then start up again in Email 3 thus missing a big piece of content.  OR, someone might qualify for a campaign and skip over the first 1, 2, etc emails before they are removed from suppression again.

There are some ways around this in setting up your smart list rules to make sure that nobody qualifies until they are removed from suppression, but I still think there are some holes.  It would be ideal if someone could be put into almost a "queue" where they will receive the emails once they have been removed from their "queue" period.

Anyways...hope that helps.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Michael and Don! 

We are using Marketing Suspended in a different way, so I'll have to think about using it like this. I'll play with some of these options and see if they will work.

Note: a combination of random sample and wait steps does not work because the random sample only works for a particular flow step. If you set up a random sample step, then a wait step, and then another random sample step, the system samples the full list of qualified leads each time to get the sample, which could mean the same people are getting the email twice, and others are not getting it at all.

Susan

[Anonymous]

This should be a core system feature for a mass emailing tool. Workarounds like this shouldn't be necessary:

http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L3Hc

--Evan

[Anonymous]

Agreed, throttling emails is critical to email deliverability best practices and should be an out-of-the-box solution. During our sales process we didn't even think to ask if it was included just assuming it was built out, it's that basic/critical.

[Anonymous]

Don,

Question on this... if I implement the approach in this article: http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L3Hc

Let's say 200k leads are on a mailing list, and roughly 30k of them have an email address starting with "a,b, or c"... will the Campaign Queue register all 200k leads as part of the "Send Email" flow step 1 or will it ONLY register the 30k that qualify for the IF email address="ab or c" constraint? Marketo prioritizes flow steps, with Send Email being top priority, so I wanted to confirm whether that priority is determined prior to the IF constraint or after. I would guess that all 200k are in a "Send Email" step (even thought "Do Nothing" is the selection for 170k).

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

We would like to see this as a core feature as well.

[Ryan_O_Shea]

Agreed. Other tools that I have used include this as a standard feature (ie limit to X emails sent per hour).  I was very surprised to discover that is not the case with Marketo.  Can we expect that feature in the future?

[Anonymous]

Any update on this?? Marketo, it's been over two years since this issue has been raised and you've done nothing to correct the issue.

Please comment.

[Edward_Masson]

This is pretty old and still it's at 'We Like it'...