Case Study: Mass communications
CCBN sends as many as 40,000 email messages in an hour. UnityMail Express minimises the burden on their mail server.
Corporate Communications Broadcast Network offers online investor relations services to more than 2,000 publicly traded companies, and the job of making sure investors know when news breaks falls on product manager Derek Pregent. To simplify Pregent's job, each CCBN-managed site offers an opt-in mailing list to notify shareholders of breaking news and press releases.
Each month, CCBN sends more than 2 million messages on behalf of its clients, and as many as 40,000 in a single hour. "A typical [e-mail] server can't process those kinds of volumes," says Pregent, so he uses MessageMedia's UnityMail Express service to minimise the burden on his company's mail servers. Because investors primed for instant and late-night trading won't tolerate waiting for news, CCBN worked with Message Media to establish a 15-minute turnaround guarantee, which ensures that every investor signed up for news gets the information fast enough to do something about it.
All told, CCBN operates some 7,000 mailing lists, with an average of 400 subscribers each. The company has routed its email services through UnityMail Express since early 1998. According to Pregent, the two have scaled together nicely. "It was comforting to know that we weren't their biggest customer," he says. "It makes a lot more sense to outsource the service to provide the best service to our customers. I can't imagine wanting or having to run this internally."
