You just added 500, maybe even 1,000 contacts to your mailing list. You are buzzing with the high of all that new data. It couldn’t hurt to just send all your contacts a celebratory piece of content, right?
Wait, don’t send out all that email.
It’s late, you’re in a rush to send out your latest email campaign. Maybe you should send out every email from the campaign all at once?! After all, that would save time, right?
Wrong. Unless you have a minuscule list, sending high volumes of emails all at once can spell disaster for your sender reputation.
How do you modulate your brand’s email flow to avoid sending too much?
Learn How Much Is Too Much
If you send out too many emails at once, your ISP will start watching, and perhaps throttling your sends. This means it will send out your emails in batches, to see how many spam complaints, hard and soft bounces, and how many unsubscribes you get.
These factors are what determine your sender reputation. Your sender reputation is what determines how many emails you can send out at a time. This is a number that will change – increase as long as you continue to responsibly send out emails.
Some email automation services automatically will limit how many emails you send at once, which can serve as a guide for how many emails your brand should send out at once. One company places a cap at 300 emails per 10 minutes, but that’s still a massively huge amount of email. You’ll have to play with the right rate to determine the perfect send rate for your brand.
Segment Your Audience
A great way to ensure that your sender reputation doesn’t get destroyed is to segment your audience into small manageable chunks. You can do this in a variety of ways.
Segment by Demographic Information
When you use this method, you will segment using some of the following factors:
- Age
- Job title
- Location
- Industry
- Education
By splitting your demographic information up in this way, you ensure that everyone you send to has something in common. This is good because if you are on target with your segmentation, your contacts will get relevant, interesting content for them. But the other issue is, it is hard to perfectly nail a segment so the content is relatable to everyone. If you miss the mark, you may end up with more people marking your content as spam or unsubscribing.
Segment by Time Zone
If you do insist on sending out a massive email blast, consider sending out emails to correspond with time zone. Maybe you want to hit everyone right as they open their inbox at 8 or 9 am. That means you would stagger your campaigns to send out at maybe 7:55 am local time or maybe 8:15 am local time.
This works if you have a decently small list of subscribers. Aim to come in under that 300 emails per hour, less if your company hasn’t been sending emails for that long.
Segment by Interest-Level
Send daily to only your most interested subscribers. Those are the people that open every day without fail, the ones that are enamored with every bit of messaging you send out. There won’t be many of these people, which is why it’s okay to send them content daily.
This will keep your number of daily sends low, reducing your risk of being blacklisted.
You can also stagger your weekly and monthly sends in the same way you staggered the sends by time zone. Send out emails to your users who engage with your weekly blast but spread them out over several days according to another factor like demographic information.
User-Triggered Segmentation
Maybe some of your contacts don’t engage with any of your timed daily, weekly, or monthly broadcasts but they still engage with content on your website, view products there, etc.
Segment these users off to only get event-triggered emails. This helps them connect their actions with your brand on another channel.
This can slowly help them to engage more or stay satisfied and at the same level.
Get a Dedicated IP
If you’re struggling with your volume and are suffering from unexplained deliverability woes, check in with your email service provider(ESP).
Most ESPs send your email through a shared IP, which can either help or harm your sender reputation. These IPs have been established longer, which can help ISPs trust you.
But if you’re sending out email every day, especially in high volume, you might want a stable IP so ISPs don’t penalize you for others’ actions. This will eventually help boost how many emails you can send out per hour or per day.
Create Custom Domain Names and Matching Friendly Froms
Here at HIPB2B, we make sure to create custom domain names that also match the From Address bar. ISPs like when these match.
Ensuring that your domains and your Friendly Froms match is a small detail that could make all the difference if you’re a high-volume sender. It might not boost the amount of email you can send at first, but it will help ISPs trust you more, which indirectly leads to higher acceptable send rates in the future.
As your email sending volume continues to climb, you’ll need to ensure you don’t send out too much email at once.
Figure out how many emails are acceptable to send out, as determined by how often you send and how long you’ve been doing it. Then segment your audience appropriately and clean up some of the details behind the scenes, like IP issues and domain names/friendly froms.
Give this a shot. There will never be a hard and fast limit to how many emails you can send, but the consequences are severe (blacklisting your domain) if you send too many emails at once. Be mindful, slowly change your processes, and never ramp up your volume all at once.
Let us know what you think:
- How do you send out your emails?
- What method do you use for segmentation?
- Is there anything missing from this post?
