An hour to process an email?

[Dan_Askin]

Getting fairly frustrated with the Marketo 'schedule' vs. send time. When we're trying align emails to, say press releases w/ fluid drop times, I simply cannot rely on Marketo to send the email within the 15-minute scheduling window. I understand that's not really how it works, but we can't always schedule 12 hours ahead, and, again, today, I find myself twiddling my thumbs as a materially better send time (in the aggregate) passes. Never had anywhere close to the issues with other ESPs, like Exact Target, where processing times were never an issue.

Venting aside, does the community have any advice -- keeping in mind we often have to be fluid on timing? Maybe there isn't much we can do within our use case, but I would love to see this become a non-issue.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Dan,

Are you sending these emails through a smart campaign or an email program? If an email program, check out the "Head Start" (Head Start for Email Programs - Marketo Docs - Product Docs) feature when scheduling.

[Colin_Mann]

I agree using Head Start could help here. Albeit I do think Marketo tends to move slowly for larger batches of emails.

[Adam_Benitez1]

If you need to be able to make changes within 12 hours prior to launch and are using a regular email send program make sure you don't have other large campaigns running at the same time or they could be put in a queue to be processed after the others.

And even despite this, if you have a shared Marketo server I believe it could still be slow if all the other companies sharing the server are running large campaigns at the same time. You can talk to your rep about getting on a singular server if this is causing the delays and it's that much of a concern.

[Brittany_Stover]

How big are your lists you are trying to send out?

[Dan_Askin]

Somehow missed this one ... referenced the headstart in my initial post (can't always schedule 12 hours out). Sometimes we're waiting for final ads/content, and I'm too aloof to be able to play with fate. Lists are typically 80-150k.