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Measure Send Speed

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Define your campaign goals and strategy.
  • Learn about ways to measure send performance.
  • Explain how content complexity impacts performance.

Before You Begin

Before you begin this module, make sure you complete Marketing Cloud Engagement Send Methods: Quick Look. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that badge.

Send Emails with Marketing Cloud Engagement

Marketing Cloud Engagement emails are sent fast. And our servers process billions of emails each day. That being said, some email campaigns send slower than others. Why? A number of factors contribute to send speed—some you can control (like send method, account setup, and complexity) and some you can’t (like email providers and subscriber’s mailbox status).

Marketing Cloud Engagement has a comprehensive sending architecture to allow for quick sending. But once an email leaves our servers, we no longer control how fast the email reaches users. So let’s focus on what we can control, like using the platform effectively—that’s where you come in. You can control your account and send configuration, audience data, and, of course, your message content. And we can help. Over the next few units we show you how to optimize the parts of the send process that you control in Marketing Cloud Engagement for speedy sends. 

Measuring Send Speeds

Speed is relative. So let’s discuss how we measure email performance in respect to getting emails out quickly.

Average Throughput 

Average throughput refers to the total number of emails sent for an email job, divided by the total time it took from the first send to the last. So if it took 30 minutes to send an email to 60,000 subscribers, the average throughput is 2,000—meaning roughly 2,000 emails are sent per minute. 

Send Rate Per Hour

The average throughput helps determine send rate per hour. For the previous example, the send rate per hour is 120,000 (2,000 emails per minute multiplied by 60 minutes). Here is how we classify expected send rates per hour.

Rate Approximate Sends Per Hour

Low

Tens of thousands per hour

Medium

Hundreds of thousands per hour 

High

Above one million per hour

Impact of Complexity

Based on our internal testing, we’ve seen that content complexity can make a big impact on hourly send rates. In one particular test, we sent four emails with similar content but varying complexity levels to 1 million subscribers. We summarized the results in the following table. Check it out to see how content complexity can influence send rate per hour. 

Complexity
Content Includes
Sends Per Hour

Static 

  • Fixed HTML or text content with no personalization

1 million (high)

Simple

  • Predominantly fixed HTML or text content
  • Simple personalization with a few subscriber attribute substitutions

1 million (high)

Moderate

  • Content block-based structure with three content block references
  • Personalization with many attribute substitutions
  • A dynamic substitution by data extension lookup

950,000 (medium) 

Advanced

  • Content block-based structure with more than five content block references
  • Personalization with many attribute substitutions
  • Multiple dynamic substitutions by data extension lookup, and impressions regions

750,000 (medium)

Our findings concluded that highly personalized message content that has advanced complexity can reduce send throughput by up to 25%. While your campaign may have different content and complexity, it can help you gauge your email content to see how it might impact email performance. 

Note

Want to learn more about the test, see the emails we used, and even test them yourself? Visit the help page Benchmark Messaging Performance.

Send Method Guidelines

Now that you know the impact of content complexity, let’s consider how that maps to the send methods we covered in Marketing Cloud Engagement Send Methods: Quick Look. While Salesforce can’t guarantee exact numbers for performance, we can provide a general guide based on send method and content complexity. This guide is meant to help you consider your approach to sending.

Send Method
Content Complexity
Sends Per Hour

Audience-Driven Sends

Simple to Complex 

Medium to High

Transactional Sends 

Static to Simple

High

Behavioral Triggered Sends

Simple to Advanced

Low to Medium

Journey Builder Triggered Sends

Simple to Advanced

Medium to High

Classic Email Studio Triggered Sends

Static to Simple

Low to Medium

As a general rule, as your content complexity increases, your sends per hour decreases.

Performance and Strategy

It’s important to review your campaign strategy and goals to determine email send improvements. So before you move forward with creating a new send (or changing your current method), answer a few important questions.

  • Does your email need to get to a customer immediately? For example, a password reset with a time limit.
  • Is your message transactional or commercial?
  • Who is the audience—one person or several thousand?
  • What signifies that the send is complete—when the message is sent to an entire audience or one specific recipient?
  • Is it more important to get an email to a subscriber at a certain time or simply get it sent?
  • What are your key performance metrics for this message—opens, clicks, or something else?
  • What’s more important—a highly personalized email or an email that gets to the subscriber quickly?

If you want a functional email to get to a specific person very quickly, a Transactional Send journey is usually the best choice. However, if your email is for a large audience with complex, data-driven content, you’re more likely to send an audience-driven email from Automation Studio. It comes down to the purpose of your message and what’s important for that specific campaign.

Review Your Account

Email sends aren’t typically an isolated process. For example, an email campaign might be created in Content Builder, using an audience built in Automation Studio, and ultimately sent from Journey Builder. In other words, many areas of your Marketing Cloud Engagement account (and lots of data and processes) can be involved in a single send. In Marketing Cloud Engagement Account Optimization, we suggest you start with an account audit and then take the time to clean your data. (More on this in the next unit.) And it’s time well spent, because poor data or many processes running at the same time can impact send performance. Reviewing your processes and following best practices is a key aspect of optimizing your email sends.

Next Up: Focus on Data

Now that you know the send guidelines, your campaign goals, and what’s going on in your account, it’s time to dissect your email and review how its data and content impact performance. In the next few units, we cover each of these areas to provide you with suggestions. First up, data. 

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