Email Marketing: Send Emails to Large Databases in Batches

Imagine you have a sale starting at 9am – your shop can possibly fit around 500 customers at a time. What happens when you have 1,000 people arrive at 9am? You have queues out the door, a cramped and inferior shopping experience as well as customers getting annoyed and leaving the store without buying anything. Believe it or not, your online store is no different.

Your online store will have a capacity, and it may not be as large as you think. Even if you have a scaling cloud set-up if you have too many visitors all at once you can end up spending substantially more for your hosting than if those customers were spread out.

So how do you control the traffic coming to your site to keep it spread out? One of the most common offenders is email marketing. More specifically, bulk emails for sales and special offers. A lot of companies tend to send out their email to 10,000 recipients all at once. The end result is the vast majority of user will visit their website all at the same time. This is where sending emails in batches come in handy.

Tools such as MailChimp allow you to break the email up and send it in smaller groups over a specified period of time. For example you can choose to send the emails in 10 batches every 10 minutes. This will spread the load out over a 100 minute period minimising the risk of everybody hitting the site all at once. This means instead of 1,000 people arriving at 9am, you have 100 at 9am, another 100 at 9.10am, another 100 at 9.20am etc.

This is one of those easy tricks to assist your website to deliver at it’s optimum and help improve your conversion rates.