Introduction

 

NetMailBot can be used to send out “staggered” mass mailings when you need to make some kind of announcement that requires a response from your recipients, but you must control the rate at which the responses come in for various resource-related reasons. Perhaps your staff can only handle so many responses at a time, or having too many responses at once could overload some computing resource, such as a server. In a staggered mailing, you send emails to a list of recipients in manageable batches with delays in between. For example, if there are 1000 recipients, you might send emails to them 50 at a time, waiting twenty minutes in between each send.

 

One Scenario: Coordinating IT Upgrades in a Controlled Manner

 

Suppose you have a database on a central server that is used by your field sales force, and they use client software to access the database while out on the road. It becomes necessary to upgrade the software on the server, and afterwards the field staff will have to make some adjustments to their client programs in order to access the new server configuration. It is expected that the staff may need some live help from the IT department in configuring the new settings. Using NetMailBot, you could both announce the server upgrade to occur at some date and time, and send a staggered email to the field staff so that your IT staff can handle any incoming calls for assistance.

 

Another Scenario: Controlling Mass Email Campaign Response Rate

 

Another classic use of staggered mails is mass marketing campaigns. If your marketing group has used this technique for some time, perhaps they are used to getting a certain rate of responses to campaigns and have learned how many resultant leads they can manageably capture, respond to, and pass on to the sales group at a time. Thus they need to "throttle" the rate at which they send the campaign emails to contacts in their database of target audiences so as not to get overwhelmed with too many responses at once (well, perhaps that would be a good problem to have).