Noiseyard Help Center

After you import a list, your next newsletter goes out in stages instead of all at once. You will see a notice about it at the top of your newsletter pages, and the send window will say Start sending rather than Send.

Who this affects

Only contacts we have never successfully emailed, and only ones you imported or added by hand. Everyone who signed up through your own website gets your newsletter immediately, every time, exactly as before. Once an imported contact has received one newsletter, they are treated the same way as the rest.

If you imported 50 or fewer new contacts, nothing is staged at all.

How it works

• The first stage goes to 10% of your new contacts, never fewer than 50 and never more than 200.

• We then wait about a day and look at what happened: how many arrived, how many bounced, how many were marked as spam, and how many were opened.

• If it looks healthy, the next stage is three times bigger, and so on until everyone has it. A few thousand contacts usually take three or four days.

• You do not have to do anything. The stages continue on their own.

Why we do it

An imported list is an unknown quantity. Some of the addresses may be old, some may have been typed wrong years ago, and some people may not remember giving you their address. Sending to all of them at once is the single fastest way to land in the spam folder, and once you are there it is slow and difficult to get back out.

Sending a small amount first means that if something is wrong with the list, it affects a few hundred emails instead of all of them, and your reputation survives it.

What you should do differently

Avoid time-sensitive content in that first newsletter. A show this weekend, a presale that ends tomorrow or a code that expires is a bad fit, because some of your contacts will read it a few days after the others. Save those for once your list has settled.