It's that time of the year again!
Black Friday is a day of massive volumes for email globally, which puts pressure on every part of the sending infrastructure. All our accounts will be more active than usual, and all ISPs will take longer to deliver emails to the inbox, slowing down the responses.
As you are preparing your Black Friday campaigns, here is a brief summary of all the improvements that we have made in the backend since last year.
We have also prepared a list of best practices for you so that you can make the best of our industry-leading technology.
We are here for you
First and foremost, don't panic! Your success is our success, and we spend a lot of time and effort preparing for this event.
Last year our servers had 100% uptime during the Black Friday weekend and we successfully delivered over 687 million emails, 45 million push messages, 12 million web channel impressions and handled more than 50 million API calls on the day itself.
We also have processed more than 5 billion Automation Center contacts, imported 716 million contacts to Emarsys and delivered 587 million Predict product recommendations.
This year we have prepared our systems to an average increase of 30% in the numbers and have carried out a lot of improvements.
For those of you who do not get excited about the technical details, the short version is this: the Automation Center, segmentation, personalization, Web Channel, Interactions, Predict and Analytics, as well as the hardware all these services use have become faster, more reliable and more easily scalable.
For the more tech-savvy readers, here is a detailed list of improvements:
- We continued moving our services to Google Cloud Platform, resulting in more reliable services.
- Performance of AC and Segmentation Service communication was improved by employing asynchronous segmentations.
- By batching the contacts, programs with high transactional load process contacts significantly more efficiently.
- Behaviour segmentation moved to Universal Segmentation Service based on Google Cloud Platform, resulting in highly improved speed.
- More RAM added to the Segmentation Service hardware, to handle the increased amount and size of aggregations more efficiently.
- Unnecessary opt-in calculation has been deprecated from the user interface.
- Wait node database performance improved by partitioning, also improved calling back to Interactions after wait nodes.
- Most of the databases moved to Google's solutions.
- Improved handling of external events and reporting.
- Optimized sales and catalog data processing for better performance
- Further improvement of database handling.
- New servers were set up for faster data processing.
- Campaigns without personalization are served from a new backend, resulting in much faster publishing.
- Segment-based campaigns without personalization use a new service providing shorter refresh times.
- Improved email generation performance for campaigns with deep links due to new caching.
- Improved PMTA selection for generated emails.
- The MTA infrastructure has been upgraded and extended.
- Smart Insight segmentation performance improvements, segments are faster.
- Strategic Dashboard loads faster.
- Revenue attribution refreshes more often than before.
Miscellaneous
- More scalable coupons/vouchers, with improved response time handling.
- Relational data offers improved segmentation with regards to contact resolution.
- Load balancers' capacity has been increased.
Contact us
As usual, our worldwide support teams are available 24/7, meaning someone is always there when you need them.
We strive to go above and beyond expectations every single time and our teams are available via email, phone, chat and the usual ticketing system.
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