Email Sending Volume – What is it and What are The Impacts? [Free E-Book]

Email sending volume is the total amount and consistency of emails you are sending from your email service provider (ESP) like Swift Digital.

Email sending volume is what the server determines to be your regular volume of email sending. All major deviations away from this may end up with servers marking your emails as being suspicious. 

When sending emails from your ESP, it is important that you develop a relationship with the mailbox providers in order for them to trust you, your brand and your sending domain.

To build a relationship with your mailbox provider you need to send a regular and consistent amount of emails. By consistent and regular we mean sticking to a similar amount of sending at the same time over a consistent period.

You have a database of 10,000. You send one email, once a week, on a Wednesday to your database of 10,000. This would be consistent email sending.

Download Now -> Free Email Deliverability E-Book

High email volume means that you are sending a large number of emails, which could be coined as mass marketing or blanket sends. High volume emails are a large number of emails being sent to a large number of recipients. 

It is good practice in email marketing to ensure you have consistent email sending, particularly if you are sending high volume emails. 

This is because of the trust and relationship you will eventually build up with your mailbox providers, which can mean you can reap a range of benefits including; good inbox placement, high sender score, trusted domain, increased engagement and emails that are actually delivered!

Sometimes your email volumes may fluctuate, this is quite normal, it is how you approach the email volumes increasing or decreasing that’s important.

Maybe you have created new data segments this month or you are only sending to part of your database or maybe you won’t be sending an email at all or will need to send more frequently, whatever it is, it needs to be treated with caution and it is encouraged to plan out your communications using a comms strategy.

Whilst these choices and plans won’t affect your ability to send emails, fluctuating email volume may affect your ability to land in people’s inboxes or may see you spending more time in the recipient’s spam/junk folder. 

We outline below 5 areas that may be affected by your fluctuating email sending volume and what you can do to ensure you minimise the disruption.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the ability to be able to successfully deliver an email to a recipient’s mailbox. Email deliverability is made of a range of components including sending domain, DKIM, SPF, DMARC and engagement levels. 

Things that can affect your deliverability are; not having DKIM, SPF and DMARC set up on your sending domain, email volume fluctuation, free domains, abuse and complaints, no unsubscribe and also lack of engagement.

For example, if you continue to send mail and your recipients do not open your emails, they bounce every time or you make unsubscribing difficult.

Email deliverability is affected by fluctuating email sending volume as mailboxes determine how they want to treat your email based on past IP behaviour.

If your volumes are sporadic, one day you send to 500, the next day you send to 6,000 and then the day after you send to 20,000 then there is a good chance that your ability to land in one’s inbox will be affected. Keep consistent email volume and size to ensure stable deliverability.

Download Now -> Free Email Deliverability E-Book

What is Sender Score?

A sender score is a bit like a credit rating but instead, it is an email rating. It gauges how trustworthy you are in terms of email and the health of your email campaign. A sender score is between 0 and 100. 

When somebody uses emails to spam others, they usually send them in large amounts and they usually send them all in one go.

Sending in high volumes in one go like this will affect your sender score. Again the solution here is to send smaller volumes, more consistently. Try segmenting your data or sending it in batches.

What is an Internet Protocol (IP)?

IP addresses are the identifier that allows information to be sent between devices on a network.

When sending from a new IP or a dedicated IP, you will typically need to warm up that IP before you start to use it to send out all of your emails. Your email sending volume and consistency is very important when warming up your new IP. Warming up an IP means you will need to consistently send the same number of emails, usually to a small database of up to 2,000 or less on a regular basis until the IP is established and trusted.

An IP’s sender score can be tracked using programs such as postmastery. Once you have completed this for around 2-3 months, you should slowly increase the number of emails sent, but ensure your frequency and time of send remains consistent.

As we have mentioned above, consistency is everything when it comes to email sending volume. If your frequency and data lists change every time you send an email this means you will experience email sending volume inconsistency.

The higher volume of emails that are sent means that you will see an increase in your complaints which may affect your reputation.

Complaint rates are measured by the number of complaints divided by the total volume on a given day, so an increase in email sending volume can cause an increase in complaints.

Your mailbox provider will use the volume of emails sent to your inbox to determine the complaint rate for an IP. Complaint rates are measured by the number of complaints divided by the total volume on a given day. 

When a high volume of emails from an IP is delivered to the inbox, it takes a larger number of complaints to raise your complaint rate.

Think of it like you have a coffee shop that holds 20 people, you may have a complaint rate of 20% which equals 4 people complaining. If you have a larger coffee shop that holds 100 people and still have a 20% complaint rate, this will require 20 people to complain before the red flag is raised.

Complaints are stored by mail providers when they are made, this could be on the same day, a week later or a month later, not everybody opens the email at the same time.

This means if the email sending volume has decreased in that time it could potentially inflate your complaint rate, however, if you keep to a consistent volume your complaint rate will remain similar also.

Moral of the story is… to ensure your emails continue to land in the inbox of your subscribers, and to achieve a high sender score keep your email sending volumes consistent and maintain sending frequency as much as you can, this includes time and day.

Download Now -> Free Email Deliverability E-Book