Resources :: Digital Impact SchedulerThis utility provides an easy way to convert a large list of email segments (or cells) intended for a Digital Impact email campaign into a time slotted launch schedule. This utility is useful to companies that use Digital Impact to launch email campaigns with many large segments (like 20 or more). If you use Digital Impact but typically only launch a few segments at a time then this tool will not be perceived as anything special to you.I created this utility to compensate for a missing feature in the current Digital Impact tool (IMO). Let's pretend that you have an email campaign with 20 segments and equally spread across those segments you have approximately 1,000,000 subscribers (that's 50,000 subscribers per segment). Now say that your web server, which your launched email links to, is only capable of handling 20,000 emails per hour. The current Digital Impact tool lacks the ability to throttle the entire campaign (regardless of segment ordering) to twenty thousand emails per hour. Instead this throttling capability is managed individually per segment. Unfortunately, setting a single launch time and a single sending rate means that those two rules get applied individually to each individual segment. On the surface this doesn't sound so bad but imagine for a moment that you've just launched 20 segments at 2:00pm with 50,000 emails each throttled at 20,000 per hour. You would like to think that means that the 1,000,000 emails will be sent out at 20,000 per hour until finished. Unfortunately by specifying the same launch time for each segment you've told each segment to send out 20,000 per hour until that segment is done. This translates into 400,000 at 2:00pm, 400,000 at 3:00pm and 200,000 at 4:00pm. Well, chances are very good that you just managed to DoS your own web server with your own email campaign. Ha Ha! There is a solution to this problem and it's quite simple (though it'd be nice if it were a standard DI feature). The solution is to specify a unique launch time as well as a throttled sending rate for each segments. This results in a true campaign level sending rate throttle (not just at the segment level). Obviously performing these calculations yourself would take quite some time. That's where this utility comes in. If you can put your cells into a csv file then this utility can tell you what the launch schedule needs to be for each individual cell. When making your csv file be sure to include the first row as the column headers; cell_name and cell_size. Also be sure to put the cells in the order in which you would like them to be launched. Then fill out the form, upload your csv file and click Calculate. |
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