Brief overview of the Vuture Send process

When you create an email in Vuture and use a CRM list as the basis of the send, there are multiple steps that Vuture completes as a part of the email send. The high-level steps are described below:

• User creates email in Vuture using a template and connects this to a CRM List
• Vuture queries the CRM system and retrieves all the contacts on the list and removes all those without valid email addresses
• If you are connected to InterAction and using a sponsored list, the sponsor information is retrieved for all contacts on the list
• User completes the send page options and presses "send"
• Vuture queries the CRM system and retrieves all the contacts in the global suppression list 
• Suppressed contacts are removed from the send
• If you have anti-lists configured, at this stage any contacts in the anti-list(s) are retrieved from the CRM
• Contacts in anti-lists are removed from the send
• Finally, contacts in the bounceback list are retrieved from the CRM system
• All contacts from the bounceback lists are then removed from the send
• Once the final send list is ready, Vuture creates an email per recipient, adding in attachments, images, personalisation and dynamic content
• Each completed email is moved to the sending mail server
• The sending mail server picks up the email in batches and begins sending the emails using multiple sending threads
• Each email is delivered to the recipient's mail server
• Any emails that cannot be delivered are processed using Vuture's automated bounceback service

---

Factors that slow down your send processing 

 

What can negatively affect the speed of a send:

• Duplicate contacts in your CRM
• Blank emails in your CRM
• Large number of contacts in your unsubscribe suppression lists
• Large number of contacts in your bounce list
• Large number of InterAction personalisation fields and/or dynamic content
• Large email size
• Under-powered or overburdened InterAction Application Server
• Not downloading suppressed contacts to Vuture on a schedule (i.e. downloading them in real-time for every send)

---

Our recommendation for sending to large lists

• We suggest that if possible you send out large sends as scheduled sends which means that all of the list processing and email creation happens in advance of your required send time. When using scheduled send each individual personalised email is created and added to a sending queue and when the scheduled send time is reached all that is left is the final delivery to the recipient, which is very quick.
• Regularly curate your large lists to ensure the recipients are opening your emails and work to make the lists as targeted and relevant as possible.  Note:  to keep your lists clean, check the response history of your contacts and only send to engaged contacts, take advantage of Vuture's Check List tool.
• Manage your suppression lists, particularly your bounce suppression which should be regularly cleaned
• Enabled scheduled download of your suppression lists so they are loaded into Vuture in advance of the send
• Break down your list if it is larger than your "maximum Vuture send size" as determined below and you have not tested a larger list size

---

How to determine your largest send size

• First of all, check your InterAction maximum list size threshold  - see this article for how to check this - maxResultCountCeiling has a default value of 10,000 contacts and you will not be able to send to a list larger than this setting
• Check your sending history to view the largest list size you have previously sent to. You can do this by click on "Reports" from the home screen and selecting the "Email->Email Global Statistics" report. Select a sufficient date range to cover your annual sends and click "Table". Sort the report returned by the "Total Sent" in descending order using the drop-down to the right of the "Total Sent" column name. This will show you your largest send size.
• If you want to send to a list that is much larger than one you have sent to previously then you should follow the steps below in the section "Testing in preparation for a large send"

---

How to determine your send speed

• If you want to know how long a list is going to take to send you can estimate this by looking at the Email Send Speed report which can be accessed by clicking "Reports" from the home screen and selecting "Email->Email Send Speed". This will allow you to see spend speed for lists over a specified size. Leave the Container field blank if you want to look across the whole system. The date range will only allow a maximum of one month. Click "Table" to view your spend speeds. You can sort by the Mails per Hour column descending to see your send speeds ordered by fastest first. Note that Scheduled Sends are not currently calculated correctly and should be ignored.
• We would expect an average InterAction send with a well-performing InterAction application server to get send speeds of between 10,000 and 20,000 per hour. Please contact us if you are getting significantly lower than 10,000 emails per hour.

---

---

Work out how long you need to send to a large list

• You can use the numbers in the "How to determine your send speed" to estimate how long a send to a large list will take. 
• If you want to use the scheduled send method to get the fastest delivery then you should use the estimate to decide when to start the scheduled send, e.g. if you estimate it will take 2 hours to send from previous send speed history you should commence the scheduled send at least 2 hours before the scheduled time.