send timing
Preparation for the holiday send season — is it too late? Yeah, might be. BFCM is upon us. It’s too late to warm new IP addresses or domains, for example. However, there is one simple trick you can still implement, even now, to help deliver mail better (and possibly faster) during this peak season. Consider this: Almost everybody times their campaign launches to go out at the top of the hour, or the bottom of the hour. Exactly. Think a 6:00 am launch or a 9:30 am launch. On the hour, or on the half hour. Because everybody does it that way, mailbox providers are besieged with an onslaught of email messages, all at once, at zero minutes, and thirty minutes, past almost every hour. Which means that this can make it hard for everybody’s mail to get through the door, and it could even end up causing email processing
Do you want to be kind to your friendly neighborhood mailbox provider? Of course you do! Who doesn’t want to “do a solid” favor for a giant, faceless corporation?? I kid. Seriously, though, this pro-tip has benefit both to you and to the mailbox providers: If you can stagger your send times — don’t launch exactly at zero or thirty minutes past the hour — adjusting send start time by just a few minutes, starting anywhere from perhaps three to eight minutes early or late, you’re likely to see that mail delivered more quickly, and it might be less likely to be throttled. Because everybody else sends at the top or bottom of the hour (exactly), mailbox providers get overwhelmed with inbound email delivery attempts at those exact moments. A representative of one of the big mailbox providers explicitly confirmed for me that this happens. The implication is that if