4 beelion emails

Does mail volume contribute to blocking?

• laura
• Sep 23, 2013

• Industry

There are two extreme opinions I see among marketing agencies and email senders when it comes to volume.
One group seems to think that volume alone triggers blocks. Another group thinks volume never affects delivery.
As with many things in delivery reality is at neither extreme.
Sending lots of mail isn’t the problem. Sending lots of mail your recipients aren’t interested in getting is the problem. Last year during the US political elections the Obama campaign, for instance, sent lots and lots of mails. Their list was an order of magnitude larger than the Romney campaign and there were days they were sending 10s of mails per subscriber. It was a deluge. But they were smart, and they did a lot of data mining and they did it in a way that got recipients to act on the mail. That mail was a deluge, but it was a wanted deluge by most of the receivers.
For a lot of vendors, too, increasing volume does increase response and revenue and all the things you want to drive with email marketing. But there will be people who don’t like the increase in volume. If they’re not valuable customers, no great loss. If they are valuable customers, then the increase in volume may drive a decrease in revenue.
In terms of inbox delivery, it’s not the volume it’s how wanted the mail is. Send wanted, interesting and engaging mail, you can send dozens of times a day.
No, volume alone doesn’t contribute to delivery problems.

Cyber Monday volumes

• laura
• Nov 27, 2017

• Industry

Wow! Congrats to all the senders out there for sending So Much Volume that mail servers are full. I’ve even seen reports that STARTTLS connections are taking multiple seconds to establish at Gmail. The volume of mail that it takes to make Google slow down is impressive.

Of course, Gmail isn’t the only system exhibiting slow downs.  Other major consumer webmail providers are also showing signs their servers are under heavy load. I’m seeing reports about both AOL and Microsoft accepting mail slowly. Oddly enough, I’ve not seen anything about Yahoo having issues. Maybe folks just never use yahoo.com addresses any more.
There may not be a fix for this. It is very possible receiving systems just do not have the capacity to handle the volume of mail folks want to send today. If senders have, collectively, decided to send more mail than max capacity there isn’t much that can be done. Maybe some very forward thinking ISPs have spare servers they can deploy, but it’s unlikely.
No major advice here, just a warning that receivers may not be able to access all the mail that’s currently being shoved at them. Nothing to do except retry, and perhaps hold off some “less urgent” sends until after normal business hours. Those of you who are sending Cyber Monday sales emails may just have to extend them to Tuesday in some cases.
EDIT: After I posted this, I saw problems with Yahoo (mail accepted but not making it to the inbox) and Earthlink as well.

Ask Laura

• laura
• Jan 29, 2016

• Delivery Improvement

An Advice Column on Email Delivery
When we work with brands and senders to improve email delivery, there are many questions that come up again and again. For 2016, we thought it might be interesting to answer some of those questions here on the blog so others can benefit from the information.
Confused about delivery in general? Trying to keep up on changing policies and terminology? Need some Email 101 basics? This is the place to ask. We can’t answer specific questions about your server configuration or look at your message structure for the column (please get in touch if you’d like our help with more technical or forensic investigations!), but we’d love to answer your questions about how email works, trends in the industry, or the joys and challenges of cohabiting with felines.
Your pal,
Laura

 
 

Dear Laura,
I’m having a hard time explaining to our marketing team why we shouldn’t send email to addresses on our lists with very low read rates, that are dormant but not bouncing, or that spend less than 2 seconds reading our mail. I’m also struggling to convince them that it’s not a good idea to dramatically increase email volume during the holidays (i.e. going from one send/day to 2-3 sends/day).
We already segment based on recency, engagement, and purchase behavior, and we also have some triggered messaging based on user behavior.
Can you help me find a way to help explain why sometimes less is more?
Thanks,
The Floodgates Are Open

Dear Floodgates,
ISPs ask two fundamental questions about email when it comes in:

1. Is it safe?
2. Is it wanted?

If the answer to both those questions is yes, the mail is delivered to the inbox.