Marketers / Marketing Cloud

Speed Up Your Marketing Cloud Journey Builder With High-Throughput Sending (HTS)

By Lucy Mazalon

New information has been published regarding High-Throughput Sending (HTS) for Journey Builder, Marketing Cloud’s canvas for building sequences of marketing activities. 

Journey Builder processing rates vary based on a number of factors – your data model, filters, configuration, activities, and content complexity (such as personalization). 

As a general baseline, you can process up to two million email sends per hour per tenant in Journey Builder – above that volume, you’ll likely find that your journey action/reaction times are experiencing lags at certain times because all journeys in your account share the same frameworks for sending messages. Multiple active journeys are termed “concurrent journeys” and will inevitably affect system performance.  

Aside from working with Journey Builder in line with best practices, there are other features you can enable to speed up processing when multiple journeys are running concurrently.

Ways to Speed Up Journey Builder

Features

  • Enable High-Throughput Sending (HTS): A setting that applies to email send activities to achieve higher throughput (more volume) and lower latency (less lag). 
  • System Priority: Take control over when journeys are activated and when they’re scheduled to process activities – in other words, plan in advance to stagger your journeys. You can use the System Optimization Dashboard to identify which journeys are sapping up processing abilities – whether that’s inefficient configuration, activities, or ‘events’ (number of non-unique contacts who went through inefficient config/activities). From there, you can change the priority order of journeys when processing levels are high to ensure those journeys are processed first.
  • Dedicated Databases: You can run Marketing Cloud as either a multi-tenant deployment (sharing the resources, like processing power, with multiple organizations), or a single-tenant deployment, where your organization gains 100% of the processing power. This makes sense that a single-tenant deployment (aka dedicated database) will speed up journeys. Obviously, this will incur a cost, but frees you from being affected by spikes in journey processing generated by other Marketing Cloud customers.  

Best Practice Tips

  • Data Management: This includes creating a pre-filtered, sendable copy of the data extension for each journey, using one-to-one data extension relationships, and opting for journey data for decision splits over contact data. 
  • Filtering Logic: Pay attention to AttributeSets, avoid ‘ends with’ and ‘contains’ operators in entry filters, and simplify entry source and decision split filters. 
  • Activities: The advice is to limit the number of activities to 150-200 per journey. There’s also context regarding messaging and wait activities.
  • Decision Splits: Avoid starting a journey with a Decision Split – but, if necessary, avoid using more than three. Consider building decision split paths in different phases and avoid back-to-back decision splits. 
  • Personalization: Mainly content block variations and ‘substitutions’ refer to personalization strings, also known as merge fields. There’s a helpful table that outlines what you should expect, breaking it down into what’s considered ‘static’, ‘simple’, ‘moderate’ and ‘advanced’, with a description and likelihood of messages sent successfully each hour (as a percentage). 

You can view all of this information in more depth on Salesforce Help

Enabling High-Throughput Sending (HTS) for Journey Builder

HTS applies to email send activities only. This achieves higher throughput (more volume) and lower latency (less lag). Once HTS is enabled for a journey, it can’t be disabled. Before you activate your journey, this can be switched on using the checkbox in the journey’s settings tab, highlighted below:

As you can’t disable once enabled, there are some implications you should be aware of: 

  • Analytics: The Journey Builder Email Send Summary and Journey Builder Email Send Summary By Day reports don’t track emails sent with HTS. Email Studio Tracking Folders are not created (metrics are available in Journey Builder Analytics and Marketing Cloud Intelligence).
  • Subscriber Counts for Suppressed Subscribers: Suppressed/errored subscribers remain in the journey but don’t receive an email. HTS doesn’t recognize configured subscriber error thresholds.
  • Email errors not listed in Journey History (view HTS email errors with this advice).
  • HTS can’t work if field-level encryption is enabled.
  • HTS won’t recognize message priority

Review the full context on the Salesforce Help page

Summary 

While there are features you can enable that will improve Journey Builder’s performance in your account, there are many more aspects that are down to your responsibility – using your expertise to analyze and amend how your journeys are configured and how your data is organized. 

The Author

Lucy Mazalon

Lucy is the Operations Director at Salesforce Ben. She is a 10x certified Marketing Champion and founder of The DRIP.

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