Email Communication Limits

[Sean_Tierney2]

Have a rather large communication going out and curious if anyone has hit any performance limits or have had any lessons learned from large email sends. Does Marketo even have a max number of emails it can send at one time?

[Anonymous]

There is no limit per se, but I believe that it will only send out about 1 million per hour.

[Priyank_Joshi3]

As per my understanding if you do not have dedicated server, Marketo uses its own servers to send out emails as per its availability. Leads are clubbed together as per the algorithm designed and is sent in certain number of batch leads. Though on your campaign status it would say campaign ran on x date and time.

Thanks

Priyank

[John_Clark1]

Hi Sean,

How many emails will you be sending?

In general it's better to split the sending into a few smaller groups if that can be arranged.  That helps keep deliverability high, and doesn't impact system performance as much.

John

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Sean Tierney​,

When you click on "Marketing activities", at the top of the left hand marketing activities section of Marketo, you have a tab on the right section called ""Campaign Queue". Click on this one, and you will be able to see.

You can also go to the Smart Campaign being executed and click on the "result" tab. It will show you what has been done so far. It will enable you to evaluate the speed at which the campaign is executing.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Sean Tierney

This may depend a bit on what your database demographics look like, but for larger batch sends I usually split sends into smaller segmented campaigns, as John Clark suggested above. Geo works well for this, as you'll ideally want to send email to people within a certain time range during the day (morning, early morning, mid-afternoon, whatever) anyway.

For our database this typically means four groups - North America, EMEA, APAC, and ROW, which acts as a catchall "everyone else" group. We see more open activity in NAM later in the morning (9am - noon) while EMEA geo tends to open more emails either early (8-10am) or in mid-afternoon (2-5pm).

Depending on your specific case there are a few other things to think about:

Validate your older email addresses. Especially if some of these leads are on the older side (6+ months to a year or more), definitely consider doing a Datavalidation (or similar) scan to identify any invalid emails or spam traps. Helps with deliverability, and helps speed things along a bit by letting you pull the dead addresses out of the campaign before it starts.

Filter any generic addresses. I recommend excluding info@company.com, admin@company.com, support@company.com, etc.  They tend to be either lists with multiple recipients and many feed directly to a company system (e.g. support@company.com automatically creating a Zendesk ticket).  For smaller batches or triggered campaigns it's not really an issue, but in larger batch sends having a lot of these around can actually hit your overall performance pretty hard.

Do a smallish subject line test. If you're really going to send the same email to everyone, you can random sample 5-10% of the recipient pool and test 2 versions of your subject line, then use whichever version performed better for the remaining 90-95% of recipients.  The fun part of big batch sends is that they're GREAT for testing performance of 2 or more variations of an email.