Long Delays in Email Sends

[Anonymous]

Anyone else not having their emails delivered in a timely manner?  We are experiencing long delays and it's getting progressively worse.  It started with emails taking 2 hours after being scheduled, then a few weeks later they were taking 4 hours and 2 emails took 12+ hours to be delivered yesterday, not at all helpful when executing time sensitive campaigns.

Any insight as to why this is happening?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I would have to ask, how large are the lists you are sending to?  And how dynamic are the emails?  Are you using velocity scripting?  All of these things will make the email take longer to send.

Good news is that we are going to be releasing a new version of email that does all of the pre-processing before you send so it will go out faster.

Should be out this year

[Josh_Hill13]

In addition consider

• complexity of the smart list - nest smart lists takes longer, behaviors take longer, CONTAINS takes longer.
• # of running triggers and batches at the SAME TIME
  • too many triggers cause overall slowdown
  • if you run too many batch sends at the same time, you can slow down the entire system.
• # of leads in the send

[Anonymous]

We have been working with our reps (who have been very helpful) to try and make our production environment as efficient as possible, however the efficiency gains may become moot seeing as we could easily triple our traffic in the next 6 months. On top of that, we have a number of stakeholders in the company requesting campaigns that would necessitate even more triggered campaigns.

We have been talking to Marketo about moving to a quieter server pod, or paying to increase our pipeline, but I fear it will not be enough as we continue to grow. 

Because we send a lot of operational emails to our clients (account recovery, reset password, time sensitive links) that need to go out instantaneously, we have been considering setting up a separate service like a Sendgrid to handle those. We'd definitely rather not split up our email services like that, but it is something we are considering if the efficiency gains are not substantial enough.

Josh, have you had any experience dealing with other vendors to send time sensitive emails?

[Dan_Askin]

Patrick, we have similar issues -- and, working for a sports org, it's even more important that deployment occurs on time. Coming from an Exact Target world, the processing lag has been excruciating. And delays in things like opportunistic ticket offers have cost us revenue in the aggregate. I'm still looking for ways to improve the situation beyond ... creating a static list of each send, which will speed up the processing -- because you've already done much of it manually.

[Dan_Askin]

Speaking of the devil, have a send that's going on an hour forty minutes of "processing."