Deployments: How to throttle/flow rate your email campaigns?

[Anonymous]

Hello all

How do you throttle (or flow rate) your deployments at 5k per hour, for example? It is important to us to throttle our campaigns especially when we have a large volume as this helps from a deliverability perspective.

Most ESP's offer this however from my understanding this cannot be done in Marketo? Is this correct?

Thanks

Joel

[Mike_Reynolds2]

The way to do this would be to break up your audiences into multiple chunks and then schedule different campaigns to do each of the staggered sends.

[John_Clark1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Joel,

There isn't an automatic throttle in Marketo.  You would need to have separate lists of 5k each and use choices in your flow steps to send to each list separated by wait steps, or you can use separate campaigns like Mike suggests.

You can also use the Random Sample feature instead of separate lists.  This would work by adding a choice to your Send Email flow step and then saying "If Random Sample is (some percentage of your total leads for the campaign(ex. 50 if you have 10k leads)) > send email (email name), otherwise "do nothing".

You'd then use a wait step and a Remove From Flow step with a choice that says "If was sent email > Remove from flow".  This will remove all leads that have already been sent the email, and you can continue the flow with another Send Email flow step that has another choice and random sample combination.  Does that make sense?

John

[Dan_Stevens_]

I actually heard previously that Marketo does in fact do some throttling of larger email sends.  If I come across it, I'll post it here.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Dan, I think that would be a post many people would like to see, so by all means let me know when you do!

[Anonymous]

Thanks John - this seems like the only option but I do hope Marketo creates a feature where this can be done more simply.

Silverpop for example allows you to set the throttle rate at the specific campaign level, just prior to hitting the 'send' button. Furthermore, you can actually set the default throttle rate at a global level in the admin area, so that all campaigns go at the default throttle rate unless otherwise specified. No need for creating queries and flow steps, just enter in your desired volume per hour and BAM!

To the ideas board I go...!

Thanks

Joel

[Dan_Stevens_]

Joel, I think this is where I saw it - it was a while ago as part of another discussion and idea submitted:

Re: Do I need to worry about throttling emails to one domain?

FROM MARKETO: We actually do a lot of this automatically. Most mail servers, when they feel like they are getting too many emails from one sender (like Marketo) will send us a soft bounce back saying we should wait. The mail sending infrastructure will them wait before trying again, rather than trying to force everything through and having them bounce. Now, we currently don't have a way for manual control, but the process works well if you just need the email to get delivered when possible.