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

[Anonymous]

Would the following flow work so that you do not send the email to the same person multiple times as Patrick had indicated?

If random sample is 25  send [01 EMAIL]. Default Choice: do nothing
wait one hour
If was sent email is [01 EMAIL] - Do nothing
If random sample is 25  send [01 EMAIL]. Default Choice: do nothing
wait one hour
If was sent email is [01 EMAIL] - Do nothing
If random sample is 25  send [01 EMAIL]. Default Choice: do nothing
wait one hour
If was sent email is [01 EMAIL] - Do nothing
If random sample is 25  send [01 EMAIL]. Default Choice: do nothing

[Anonymous]

It has never happened to me before. In the random sample field did you place a "%"? I just input a number (i.e. 10% = 10, 20% = 20). I always make sure that all the numbers in the random sample equal to 100.
 Try the email route and see if it does the same thing.

[Anonymous]

Hi Bentacular,

Did you ever check your log/results file? I just set it up for a smartlist of 20 emails and in steps of 10%. The first 2 hours it went okay.Then it started repeating sending the email to the same people in the second sending. Fortunately I tested it on a sample size for 20 people so I only annoyed 2 people but for whatever reason, it didn't work for me.

Any insights why it started sending emails to people already sent to?

TIA

Patrick

[Anonymous]

Nice! Thanks
 

[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]

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]

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]

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

[Michelle_Tizian]

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

[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?

[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.

[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.