Scaling Email Sends for Deliverability

After a customer makes a purchase on your website, sending them a Follow-Up Email to solicit a product review is a critical part of the UGC lifecycle, whether you choose to use PowerReviews as your Email Service Provider (ESP) or a third-party provider. If you are using a third-party provider as your ESP, this document will not be applicable to you.

If you are using the Follow-Up Email feature via PowerReviews, you are providing us with your customer Order Data and we are sending the emails through our vendor on your behalf. The reputation of the IP address used for sending these emails can impact their deliverability. Low IP reputation can lead to higher numbers of emails being flagged as spam. IP reputation is established by meeting a set of standards and best practices. When new clients of ours implement the Follow-Up Email feature, we use a process called 'IP warming' which gradually increases the number of emails sent out, so that the IP reputation is built over time in a sustainable manner.

For existing clients of ours using the Follow-Up Email feature, one factor that can impact ongoing IP reputation (and prevent emails from being reliably delivered) is sending drastically different volumes of emails on a day-to-day basis. To minimize these fluctuations and ensure a higher level of IP reputation, we automatically adjust the number of emails sent by a client per day, based on the expected volume.

For example, if you have 50 order emails that are scheduled to go out one day, and then 10,000 order emails the following day, we will need to 'warm' up to sending that full batch. This means that rather than sending 10,000 emails the following day, we will send a portion of them and will gradually increase the number of emails sent out over each subsequent day until all 10,000 from that batch are sent.

If you're sending PowerReviews your Order Data via a feed delivery method, it's therefore a best practice to provide us with a recurring feed that is imported on a daily basis, rather than uploading Order Feeds manually in large batches. A more consistent trend of Order Data maintains the IP reputation without having to make drastic changes to the number of emails we send on your behalf. If you're giving us 20,000 orders once a week instead of spreading those across each day they're received, then we'll have to keep warming back up to a higher number each time you upload, which can impact when those emails ultimately get sent.

How PowerReviews Scales the Maximum Number of Emails Sent Per Day

Increasing the Maximum Number of Emails

Your email tier is based on a simple algorithm that compares the number of emails you send per day to a value that is the maximum number of emails set for you, minus 10% of that number.

In equation form:

x >= y — (0.1 * y)

Where:

x = the amount of emails sent today

y = the current value for the maximum emails per day

Below is a table which shows the values which may be set for the maximum number of emails per day, and the number of emails you have to send in a single day to be moved to the next tier. Each tier, except for the final one, is more than double the amount of the previous tier: 

*indicates that there is a maximum number of 164,369 email sends per day, per Merchant

Example Scenarios

Example 1:

Your maximum number of emails is currently set to 50. You send 46 emails.

46 >= 45

Because you sent 46 emails, and that value is greater than the threshold of 45, we would then set you to 103 maximum email sends for the following day.

Example 2:

Your maximum number of emails is currently set to 20,828. You send 35,000 emails.

35,000 >= 18,745

Because you sent 35,000 emails, and that value is greater than the threshold of 18,745, we would then set you to 44,270 maximum email sends for the following day.

Decreasing the Maximum Number of Emails

Conversely, we will also adjust your email sends down if the amount of emails you send is less than the number in the preceding tier.

Example:

Your maximum number of emails is currently set to 9,799. You send 3,500 emails one day. The next tier down is 4,610 emails per day.

3,500 < 4,610

We will therefore adjust your maximum number of email sends down to 4,610 for the following day. This check will continue and, if necessary, adjustments will be made until a minimum of 50 maximum emails is reached. We will never set a threshold lower than 50.