What’s Email Throttling — and Why Do You Need It?

What is email throttling?
Throttling is the ability to control your campaign sending at a more granular level by limiting the number of messages sent to a recipient’s mail server based on time intervals. In other words, the throttling process slows down an email on your server or through your service provider over the course of several hours.

What are the benefits?
Throttling typically results in improved deliverability and fewer bounces. But its success depends on a number of factors. There’s no magic formula for when to throttle, how many to throttle, or who to throttle to. It’s a constant process of tweaking, testing and analyzing data — but the effort should be rewarded with a concise set of metrics and analytics to work with. After a few campaigns, you should begin to see what times of the day are more successful for your transmissions as well as which recipients have improved deliverability. Keep in mind that all of this depends on the cleanliness of your lists, the content of your messages and your sending reputation.

How does throttling work?
Gold Lasso uses two kinds of throttling — at both the hardware and software level — for even greater control. At the hardware (Mail Server) level we use settings that have been researched and tested based on how ISPs are configuring their mail servers to throttle. By the same token, the recipient mail servers are configured with a threshold as to how many concurrent connections as well as how many transmissions per connection they will allow. If you exceed these levels, your messages can be throttled back to the originating (sending) mail server with the possibility of deferment or bouncing of the messages. If the messages are throttled properly from the onset, however, you limit your risk of this happening.  

How do I plan my throttled campaign?
Planning is essential to a successful campaign. Your campaigns should be set up to go out over a specified time (e.g., 10,000 messages per hour over a 10-hour period). You don’t want to spread your campaigns too thin so that they run in to one another. And you may not want your campaigns to go out all night long either. Here’s a good rule of thumb: divide your campaign into 10 equal parts over 10 hours. If your lists are smaller you could send every 30 minutes over a five-hour period. And if timing’s not a priority for you, you could “trickle out” your emails over several days.

Who should use this feature?
Everyone should use it to some degree, especially if you have a large number of emails that are going to the same domain (e.g., 20,000 @yahoo.com addresses.)  Because Gold Lasso uses both hardware- and software-level throttling, all of our clients get the benefit of hours of research and tweaking on the hardware side. And even though Gold Lasso is automatically throttling on the hardware side, it’s a good idea to throttle at the software level as well for even better results. Even if you’re only sending out 1,000 emails in your campaign you may see improved deliverability.  The only exception to this rule is if your lists are extremely clean. But even with an extremely clean list, you may get even better results by throttling. It’s definitely worth a shot!

For more information on throttled campaigns, please contact your designated eLoop Account Manager.