Adventures in Mobile Marketing

I got a great question a few weeks ago (so sorry for the lag!) regarding this:

Anna,
We’re installing a new commerce server, and recently discovered it has no ability to throttle outgoing emails. A stand-alone server outside of this platform has been configured to distribute our marketing emails, but we have been unable to find a throttling solution for the transactional email server.

Kate, at SuppliesGuys

Kate,

Frequency control is managed by some tools using business logic that determines exceptions- “only email this person once per day” or “never email this person with a similar promotion for the last 6 months.” The frequency control software I’ve seen has been either manual SQL scripts filtering each outgoing campaign, or part and parcel of an email marketing software solution.

For transactional emails that are triggered by the customer’s activity, it’s not really recommended to introduce a frequency control. Basically because the numbers are rather low, and real-time triggered emails are more appropriate than scheduled marketing emails. If you do have special events- I’ve seen systems support live pay per view wrestling matches that resulted in a very high volume of traffic, and usually launches, releases, or other time-based online traffic generate unusual loads- then throttling is a great idea.

One thing that is a little bit of a fly in the ointment, is that transactional emails and promotional emails have different CAN-SPAM requirements. So I’ve seen these split up in a few different organizations. One system sends the transactional, another sends the opt-in, “once-a-week” promotional emails.

Strongmail is an inhouse solution that is expensive, but I usually point to it to clients if they do want to have real control over transactional & promotional emails in one system, by one IP. There are issues with SM and it’s not the solution for everyone. You can optionally offput those transactional emails to your ESP, and then they control the frequency and throttle for some domains like AOL. The benefit to this is that you have one IP that your client base whitelists. The downside is that it’s a point of risk for any failure, and transactional emails are usually very key to the operational income to your site.

As for freeware that does throttling, I’m not aware of any. I’d actually recommend that as the best solution- keep it inhouse, and setup a “ticker” to count the number of outgoing transactional emails. when it reaches a recommended threshold, setup a delay mechanism.

Thanks and good luck!