It might be around the time of Christmas, Black Friday, or some other special occasion where you intend to send out a form of communication to a large portion of your Agillic database. In order to make the best possible send out with no errors, we'll explain our best practice methods.
In this article, you'll find information about:
Agillic's Recommended Best Practice on Preparing for a Large Send Out
Follow the Correct Workflow
When you plan a big send out, it's extremely important that you still follow the correct workflow for working in Agillic.
If you don't follow the correct workflow, you can run into publishing issues, data integrity problems, as well as other unintended behaviour including being prevented from doing a send out.
You can read more about our best practice on workflow here.
Consider a Batch Execution
If your send out includes a limited offer and links to your external webshop, you might consider organising your send out in batches.
This way, you limit the amount of traffic to your webshop as you avoid having your entire segment receive your communication at the same time.
You can learn more about how to create a batch execution here.
Test, Test, Test!
The best way to avoid unintended behaviour is to thoroughly test all parts of your configuration. This includes creating test recipients to reflect all types of real live customers you intend to send to so you're sure that the content appears as intended, no matter what variation your customer receives.
An example of this could be that you want to send out an email that contains one Promotion with five Propositions and one Multi-Content Block.
In that case, you'll need to test with:
- 1 test recipient who's in the Target Group used for the Multi-Content Block.
- 1 test recipient who isn't in the Target Group used for the Multi-Content Block.
- 5 test recipients - 1 for each Proposition used in your Promotion.
Once you have all the necessary test recipients, you can test in a number of ways. However, a good rule of thumb is to both test the communication that you intend to send, as well as the Flow used for the send out.
You can read more about how to test in different ways here:
- How to test an email in the Channels module.
- How to test an SMS. When sending out a large number of SMSs, we recommend that you also test how many message parts your SMS is. Learn how to test how many message parts a SMS is here.
- How to test a Flow.
Avoid Duplicate Contact Information
Duplicates of email addresses and mobile numbers can mean that you end up sending multiple of the same communications to the same receiver.
To avoid this happening during a large send out, Agillic strongly recommends that the Person Data used to store email addresses and the Person Data used to store mobile numbers are set to unique.
Set Up Notifications in Case of a System Pause
If you do end up sending multiple communications to the same contact information within a short period of time, your Production environment might pause. When a Production environment pauses, it stops all further communications from sending until the system is resumed.
Read more on how to handle a system pause here, where you can also read how to set up email notifications for when your Production environment is paused. A system pause means a single recipient has received more than 10 communications in less than 10 minutes or 3 recipients have recieved 5 communications within 10 minutes.