How should I set up sending in batches?

If you're reading this article, you've probably put together your first broadcast but you've hit a screen asking you for your batch size and aren't quite sure what to put there 🤔

Let's help you work it out!

Bento allows you to send in batches which means you can divide a large list over a specific time period.

The reason you want to do this is to 1) warm up your domains reputation with large email providers like Gmail and Yahoo aswell as 2) throttle your requests to those same providers to signal good behaviour.

When setting up batching you are given the following options:

Batch size: how many people in a given period should get the email.

Batch interval: how often the batches should be run (hourly, daily, etc).

A good place to start is to estimate your total monthly email volume and divide that number by 30. Then, try to spread your sending evenly over the first 30 days, based on that calculation.

For example: if you will send 90,000 emails/month, you should start off sending 3,000 per day over the first month.

If you want to be more aggressive you can instead divide by 15.

For example: say you still need to send the same 90,000 email/month, but you need the emails to reach your recipients in half as long of a time frame, send 6,000 per day for the first 15 days.

After you've done a successful warmup (guaged by an improvement in open rate) you can then start sending more rapidly to the list but we still recommend you send as slowly as possible.

For a general marketing broadcast, we see the best results for customers sending over a 5-8 hour period (list size / 5 * per hour).

Most reputation systems only store data for 30 days, so you should not go 30 days or more without sending on Bento.

If you do, then you will need to warm it up again.