Ask anybody to name their top five favorite things about email, and
“speed” is sure to be somewhere near the top of their list. The speed with which content can be delivered is what draws many people to email marketing, and specifically Bronto.
For those of you that have been at Bronto for awhile, you already know that we get your messages out fast. In fact, we just made significant improvements to our sending infrastructure in our Spring 2009 Release that makes message delivery even faster. Now what if I was to tell you that you can optimize your message delivery to even further increase your message delivery speed? Oh yeah, get ready to put the pedal to the metal!
The Rules Of The Road
At Bronto, we send out a ton of email every day (check out our delivery statistics). Now it would be great if we could just send everyone’s message out instantaneously as soon as they click send (trust us, we would if we could). Unfortunately, that’s not the way email works. There are three main things you need to know about our system in order to achieve maximum sending speed:
- Small deliveries going to less than 10,000 contacts should deliver in a matter of a few moments.
- Larger deliveries will take longer.
- The application sends messages on a first-come/first-served basis.
The Early Bird Gets The Worm
Obviously, sending out your messages to a smaller list or segment is the easiest way to achieve maximum delivery speed. You can send to a smaller number of contacts by highly targeting your message using segments, or simply by using our clean contacts feature to rid your list of contacts who don’t need to be there. However, for a lot of people, sending to under 10,000 contacts is simply not a viable or realistic option.
Worry not big senders! Focus for a moment on the last bullet point in the list above. If you schedule 
your message in advance, there is a greater likelihood that you’ll be first in line, and will therefore have a quicker message delivery. You message isn’t considered “in line” until it is pre-processed. Pre-processing involves making sure that all the customizations you have made to your message (adding in data for field and special tags, queuing up the appropriate lists and segments, etc.) are complete before the message gets sent out. Depending on the size and complexity of your message, pre-processing can take some time. When you schedule your message delivery in advance, pre-processing gets taken care of long before your message is actually sent. Hence, when it comes time for your message to be delivered, everything is ready to go. If you choose to send a message immediately, the pre-processing will need to run before the message is sent. Depending on the size and complexity of your message, a slight delay may occur between when you click send and when the delivery actually occurs (thus why scheduling your delivery in advance can speed things up).
Avoid Rush Hour Traffic
When scheduling your delivery, another factor you will want to take into consideration is the time and date that you send your message. You can think of our message sending pipeline as a highway. Just like a real highway, our message sending highway is subject to having times of the day when traffic gets a little heavy. Generally speaking, our message traffic volume is highest during peak business hours Tuesday-Thursday. Hence, you could improve the speed of your message delivery by sending during off-peak hours or during off-peak days. Don’t worry though, if your message is being sent during peak hours on a peak day, it will still get there in a timely manner, just not as fast as it would during non-peak hours/days.
Questions, comments, concerns? Drop us a line in the comment sections below!
John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist @ Bronto
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