Stagger an Email Send

Details

A staggered send allows you to send an email to your contacts in groups, with a delay occurring between groups. Let's take a look at how to configure this. 

How-to Guide

1. Select Contacts from the sidebar.
2. Use the dropdown at the top of the table to ensure you're viewing the correct list.
3. Click the Table Settings (small ⚙️) icon towards the top-right of the table and enable the Contact ID field. Click Apply. This field will now be shown as a column in your main contacts table.
4. In your table of contacts, click the Contact ID heading - which will order your contacts by their ID. Make note of the first contact ID (in this example the list starts at 1, but that may not be the case for your list).
   
5. Decide how many groups you would like to split your contacts into. For this example we will use three groups consisting of 30,000 contacts each. As such, when we go to do our send shortly, we will be splitting up our contacts by their ID.
6. Next up, select Messages from the sidebar.
7. Locate and highlight the message you'd like to send.
8. Select Send from the Actions dropdown.
9. Configure the send screen parameters as per normal. When you're ready to choose your recipients, click Select Contacts.
10. Select the Advanced Search option.
    
11. In the advanced search criteria, configure the search as follows...
    Contact ID is Less than using a value of 30001 (as shown below).
    
    

    You may need to adjust the numerical value for your contacts - as your list may be smaller, or your groups of staggered ends may be of different sizes.

    If you stagger sends regularly, you can actually save these advanced searches for future use by using the Save Search option.

12. Click Search.
13. Enable the Schedule panel by turning it on, and set the date & time to send this first batch.
    
14. Click Send to schedule your message at the chosen time. We would suggest choosing a time that is after that of the first schedule.
15. Repeat steps 7 - 11, but be sure to configure your Advanced Search a little differently, so that this time, we search for & select contacts with IDs greater than a value of 30001 but less than a value of 60001 - as shown.
    
16. Just as before, click Send to schedule your message at the chosen time. Again, we would suggest choosing a time that is after that of the existing two send schedules.
17. If, like us in our example, you still have more contacts to send to, then repeat the process (steps 7 - 11) again - but this time, our last group of contacts will have their Advanced Search configured as follows...
    Contact ID is Greater than using a value of 60000 (as shown below - with no other fields).
    
18. Just as before, click Send to schedule your message at the chosen time.

Congratulations, you have now staggered your send (and scheduled it), by using the Contact ID field to split your contacts into groups for your send.