Does sending emails in smaller batches improve deliverability?

[Anonymous]

From what I understand, some corporate servers will block emails from reaching their final destination if they see a lot of emails with the same content coming through at the same time.

Does anyone have experience with sending out emails in smaller batches over time? When does it make a difference?

TIA

Patrick

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, if you dump 1000 of the same message to the same domain, it's possible the server will throttle you down or block some of the messages. I use "1,000" as an example, but that's going to hit a large company and make the server suspicious.

In general, smaller batch emails will do better IF they are highly targeted. If you send 200 of the same message to one domain, that could be an issue for that domain.

It is a good idea to send smaller groups to a single domain when you are first using Marketo, so the servers see you as a friend and not as a random spammer.

Major public domains like yahoo and gmail will also be suspicious if you send too many messages at once, but then we're talking about several thousand or tens of thousands if you haven't been a good sender before.

[Anonymous]

How much email do you want to send out, and to which domains?

There is such a thing as "IP warm-up", where for new IP addresses specifically for larger B2C domains such as gmail you start small and increase count over time (a few weeks, there are guidelines for that). For B2B (other company) servers, it is whatever they set it up to be, and usually you just send a few batches, smaller to larger, while monitoring deliverability. If there are problems, you scale down.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your insights.

Any idea of batch size and time in between sendings? Would a sending of 100 emails per domain every hour yield good results? Or should we do 10 emails every 6 hours?

[Michelle_Tizian]

Definitely in small batches and I try to stagger the delivery of the emails by regions, or by time zones.  

[Anonymous]

I usually throttle emails using the wait step of 1 hour in the flow using random selection or alphabetically

[Anonymous]

I like the idea of doing it hourly as I can also see response/open rates per hour. How do you set up a random selection flow step?

[Anonymous]

Hi Bentacular, how do you set up a random flowstep that sends out a list over 4 different times?

TIA for any guidance

Patrick

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Use the Send Email condition in your flow step. Then click Add Choice. Now with the choices, you can get as granular as you want. My 2 favorites are alphabetical and random sample.

Example conditions for flow:
If email address starts with a; b; c  send email. Default Choice: do nothing
wait one hour
If email address starts with d; e; f  send email. Default Choice: do nothing
wait one hour. yada yada yada

 or

If random sample is 25 (representing 25% of the whole list)  send email. Default Choice: do nothing
wait one hour
If random sample is 25  send email. Default Choice: do nothing
wait one hour
If random sample is 25  send email. Default Choice: do nothing
wait one hour
If random sample is 25  send email. Default Choice: do nothing

 

[Anonymous]

Nice! Thanks