Staggering Email Sends - scheduling or through workflow
Marketing need to stagger email sends so that the call centre can manage traffic produced by campaigns. Currently we can manually seperating the static lists and cloning campaign emails and sending seperately over 4 hours. Not an efficient use of time, and human error happens.
We would like to be able to stagger our email sends in one of two ways:
1. Stagger email send through email scheduling functionality
2. Seperate static lists and send same campaign through a workflow (workflow would seperate lists 50/50 or into 1/4
dotdigital currently has the functionality to split lists through workflows. More efficient use of time and ensures data is split correctly
This idea needs more attention. We have a similar need.
Our company expects a large number of replies to our sales newsletter, which would result in conversations with Account Executives. If we send all emails at once, that means all replies would come at once, which can be hard for sales to manage. It woud be better if we could send the newsletter slowly over the course of a month so that those replies will be spread out and much more manageable.
I built out a workaround for my clients e-mail staggering needs. I added two custom properties to all clients, E-Mail Group Day and E-Mail Group Number. (I added day and group number because my client sends e-mails to hundreds of thousands of people at a time. If you have smaller lists, you could just do group number) Create an Excel spreadsheet with all of your clients, and add the Group Day and Group Number columns. In the "Group Day" column, enter in Monday, then on the next client Tuesday, and so on. Then, for the "Group Number" column, write in the number 1 for the first client, then 2 for the next, until you get to 20. Then, drage those entries for both columns to the bottom, so that all the boxes are filled with a day and a number. (Tip: to avoid company wide spam filters, sort list by company name before entering the numbers to ensure those at the same company receive the email at different times). Then, upload the list to hubspot with the new property data included for all clients. Then you can move on to the workflow build I have attached below. Let me know if this helps!
@SDiserens, you should try the 3rd party HubSpot app Split Test Automation (free). This would make your workaround a little easier I think. Though I will say it is NOT a fully sufficient solution, and HubSpot should still add throttling as a native feature.
Split Test Automation lets you create workflow actions that split incoming contacts to different cohorts. Then you can add actions to each cohort branch to update your custom properties or just delay the send of the email (thats what I did). It would be much easier than importing/exporting from excel as it is fully automated.
I created a workflow that throttles a send evenly across 3 weeks by doing the following:
Splits enrolled contacts into 3 cohorts, with 0, 7, and 14 day delays
Additional Splits and delays in each of those cohorts delay contacts for each day of the workweek.
It's kind of a beastly workflow to build, but its maintenance free.
This needs to be looked at in more detail. Email deliverability is getting tougher than ever. With lists of 20k or more contacts, sending a marketing email in one go can be a disaster for email reputation as well as for the sales team to stay on top of replies.
There needs to be an option in HubSpot such as "Stagger the sending of this email between 7am Saturday and 7pm Sunday" so it sends out in smaller batches over that period.
Hubspot definitely needs to come up with a throttle option for bigger sends. There needs to be an option that allows sends to be staggered by a certain amount by hour or half hour and that will continue at that rate of send until completed, along with the hours that we want the send to occur. This is a standard function in every other email platform I have used and is essential for effective deployment and engagement in email campaigns that have a large list size. The solutions listed above are nice for a/b testing and where we want to split lists by different email design or copy or subject line, etc. However, even in those situations, the need to split the list send size over a period of time to increase deliverability for each segment is crucial for the health of the list and the deliverability and engagement of the campaign.
I hope this is on the list of development upgrades. We are currently having to use a different esp in order to handle our larger email campaigns and that is quite ineffective and inefficient considering that having the full customer journey and understanding of the interactions at the contact level is why Hubspot is a great tool. Not being able to use it for all marketing nurture campaigns due to this inability is very frustrating and defeats the purpose of having a tool such as Hubspot.
Upvoting this per comments around the new Gmail/Yahoo deliverability changes. Please enable this feature for *all* email types, including feedback survey emails.
Considering that Google's latest email guidelines (mentioned here) suggest not sending in large bursts or risk deliverability issues, it seems throttling should be a high priority for HubSpot.
We send newsletters to +20k which could be a real issue for us soon.
This would be a helpful feature to have. I have a client that uses a platform that has a 'Send Over Time' feature. You can set the Start Date and End Date for the email launch. Then the system spreads out the total emails sent over the period set based on system resources and bandwidith.
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.
