Campaign Enterprise is built on an email merging and delivery engine with more than eight years of speed optimization behind it. With the right hardware (see System Requirements for details), the performance edition of Campaign Enterprise can merge and submit to your SMTP server at speeds up to 800,000 emails per hour (depending on network and mail server quality). On high-end hardware, this number goes beyond one million. Future versions of the software use advanced clustering to scale to literally millions of emails per hour.

But speed statistics can be misleading. First, when you're comparing email delivery speeds, make sure you're comparing apples to apples. With Campaign Enterprise, you're delivering personalized, unique emails that have to be delivered one at a time. Other email delivery systems can easily exceed Campaign's speed by sending the same exact message to everyone. With that method, emails don't have to be handled individually, so the throughput is much faster. Remember: Campaign Enterprise delivers a personalized email to each recipient, and that means the software must read from the database and construct each message, one at a time. Given all the work that takes place to send personalized emails, Campaign's speed of 800,000 per hour is considered remarkable!

Far more important to speed considerations is the speed of your mail server. Once Campaign Enterprise creates the emails and submits them to your mail server, it's still up to your mail server (SMTP server) to deliver those emails. And that's where most speed bottlenecks occur: in the mail server, not with Campaign software.

Why Mail Servers Are The Bottleneck...
If you haven't previously managed high-volume email campaigns, you probably don't have a high-speed mail server up and running right now. Or perhaps you've simply been using your ISP's mail server.

In either case, you might be under the (false) impression that you can dump a few hundred thousand emails onto these mail servers, and they'll rapidly deliver them for you. In reality, you'll find that once you start emailing 100,000 or more, you need to make new arrangements.

Here's why: if you're using your ISP's mail server, you'll quickly discover that they won't let you push a hundred thousand emails through their system. Why? The spam factor: they don't want to open themselves up to the risk of allowing spam, so they limit the email volume of their customers. This is never an issue if you're just sending a small number of personal or business emails, but when you start doing high-volume email marketing campaigns, you'll quickly encounter the ISP outbound email limit.

If you have your own in-house mail server, you may run into trouble if that server has never been stressed with a large outbound email campaign. Here's an example: many organizations run Microsoft Exchange as their outbound email server. Exchange works very well for regular, day-to-day email, but it's a poor performer for high-volume email campaigns. Exchange can choke under a load as small as 100,000 emails, and depending on how it is configured, its performance can plummet. This will not only delay the delivery of your campaign, it will also cause everyone else in the company to experience slowness in the delivery of their own emails. You'll have the IT manager breathing down your neck in no time!

Another solution is to buy a performance-level mail server. More capable mail servers include Sendmail, Qmail and IMail from IPSWITCH. If you're looking for extremely high-volume email delivery, we recommend a high-end hardware solution that can deliver as much as 1,000,000 emails per hour.

Of course, to make these mail servers work effectively, you'll also need plenty of available bandwidth. (See our handy email Marketing Bandwidth Requirements Chart to find out how much bandwidth you really need.)

How To Use Multiple Mail Servers
If you're sending very large volumes of email, you may also find that you need an array of mail servers churning away to deliver the email on time. To do this, simply purchase multiple servers or an array of server hardware, license the mail server software and get it installed on all the systems, Campaign Enterprise has a Multiple SMTP Server Plug-in built right in. This plug-in gives Campaign Enterprise the ability to distribute the outbound email load among as many as ten outbound mail servers.

Campaign Enterprise shares the email load among these servers, sending 1/nth of the load to each server (where n is the number of servers you have) in round-robin fashion. This gives you tremendous scalability. If you need to move up from three servers to five, for example, just type in the IP addresses of the new servers and Campaign Enterprise will add them to the rotation.

All The Speed You Really Need
In all, Campaign Enterprise delivers high-end email performance at a ridiculously low price. It's no exaggeration to say that systems with comparable performance cost $50,000 or more. But Campaign Enterprise brings you high-end features at a fraction of that price.

Of course, the best way to find out what kind of performance you'll get with Campaign Enterprise is to download it, install it and try it yourself! And if you run into any deployment challenges, just call our helpful support staff for answers.