How to send the correct amount of volume?

Environment:

Email Deliverability
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

Deliverability Impact - This answer is part of the Email Deliverability Best Practices doc community. Each answer’s intention is to contribute to the betterment of the email community. These answers are only related to outbound messages, and do not have any impact to the improvement of inbound deliverability. For more information regarding deliverability’s role at RightNow, please review the following answer page: Answer ID 2195: Email Deliverability Group (EDG) and Spam Considerations and Policy.

One metric that is often overlooked when it comes to monitoring deliverability is volume. A sender’s volume and their efforts to maintain a consistent sending volume can be just as impactful on deliverability as engagement is.

Meeting the Minimum
The success of a sender’s deliverability is largely the result of the sender’s IP reputation. Part of that reputation is determined based on a sender’s volume practices. If you have a dedicated IP address, in order to build a positive reputation, ISPs will want to see volume being sent off the IP on a regular basis. If you aren’t a high volume sender then building and maintaining a positive sender reputation on a dedicated IP address will become challenging.

Oracle recommends that senders who are sending at least 250k messages per month should be on a dedicated IP. Senders with a smaller volume or infrequent mailings should pursue a shared IP route as the combined efforts with other senders will help meet that minimum.

Keep it Consistent
ISPs determine reputation by 24 hour, 7 day, and 30 day performance trends which makes it critical that sender’s keep a consistent volume from week to week and month to month. If an ISP notices any dramatic deviations from a sender’s volume patterns it will raise a red flag. In the eyes of the ISP, these large dips and spikes mimic the behavior of spammers which will force the ISP to keep a close watch on your program and potentially bulk or block your mailings.

Occasionally marketers will ask if it is okay to send a “one-time” campaign to an audience much larger than what they typically send to. In these scenarios, we advise senders against increasing their typical volume by any more than 25% as any increase larger than this will have a greater chance of creating deliverability issues. If an increase must be made than the increased volume should be spread out over several days to minimize impact.

Summary of Recommendations

• Keep your volume consistent as well as the frequency at which you email recipients
• If you are a high volume sender than a dedicated IP is the best route
• Avoid large increases or decreases in volume to maintain a positive reputation
• If there is a need to increase volume, spread the additional volume across several days to minimize impact