If you are planning on carrying out a large mailing, for example a Consent mailing to your contacts, you should consider the following:

• Work out the total number of contacts you will be mailing
  • If contacts are coming from different data sources, e.g. multiple CRMs or a combination of CRM and CSV lists, then the total number should take into account any duplicates
  • You should make sure you cross-reference your mailing list with your global unsubscribe list to make sure contacts who have opted out are not mailed
• Break up the send into manageable chunks to avoid overloading your CRM and looking like you are sending spam
  • Look at your recent mailing history and send speeds (see the Vuture send speed report) to see the typical size of large mailings and how long these take to complete
  • Break the send up into manageable daily chunks which should be a size you know you can send to without performance issues, particularly if it is a CRM send.
  • If you are using InterAction you will have a "threshold".  This is the total number of contacts Vuture can download from InterAction in one go. If you are sending to (or suppressing on) multiple lists, the threshold needs to cover the total number of contacts (minus duplicates).
    • We would suggest chunks of between 20k and 50K depending on your overall mailing size, the performance of your CRM and your large send history
    • If you are unsure, start small (e.g the size of your largest regular send) and increase on a daily basis
• Avoid grouping contacts at the same domain
  • To avoid looking you are spamming a particular domain avoid ordering your list by company
  • If you are sending from a CRM such as InterAction then lists are ordered by Last Name so this is typically not an issue
  • If you are sending to a CSV list sort the list by Last Name before uploading
  • Use Vuture's throttling feature to limit the emails sent to a domain at the same time 
• Take care with poor quality data to avoid getting blocked by domains where you have a lot of old email addresses and crucially avoid getting blocklisted by emailing spamtraps
  • If you have contact data that may be low quality, or you are unsure of the source, you should take care when mailing these contacts
  • If they are contacts who have left a firm you will get a lot of bounces which is not necessarily an issue on its own but if a domain sees you emailing a lot of invalid emails they may throttle, drop or block your emails
  • If you have any spamtrap emails in your list then mailing these can get your sending IP address blocklisted and cause you deliverability problems which can affect your ability to send regular emails
  • Separate out low quality emails into separate sends on separate days so if you do get added to a blocklist you will know which portion of data the problem emails are in since blocklists will not tell you which email was the spam trap
• Consider using a separate sending IP for very large (e.g. over 100k) consent mailings
  • This can limit the effect of bad data, spamtraps and blocklists on your normal sending IP address
  • We can set up a second sending IP address for you to use
• Deduplicate your data if sending from different sources
  • If your data is coming from different CRMs or CSV lists then make sure to deduplicate to avoid mailing the same contact more than once
  • We have a feature that allows you to send an email so that it is not sent to anyone who received a different previous email - this can be used for sending to multiple CRM systems or sending to CRM and CSV lists - ask your Customer Success Manager about this
• Respect opt-outs
  • Make sure you don't send to any contacts who have globally opted-out
  • If you are sending to multiple sources you can do this by making sure the global unsubscribe list for each source contains the same contact lists 
  • Or if you are merging your contacts into a single source, e.g. a CSV list, make sure you have also added your global opt-outs from all sources into the global unsubscribe list
• Use this as an opportunity to clean up your data
  • As you are emailing all of your active contacts (excluding global unsubscribes) this is an excellent time to update contact details for any hard bounce so you can record that the email address is no longer correct for this contact and improve data quality for your firm.

 

Also review our general advice on large CRM sends.