Friday Night Emails : An Affiliate Account Manager responds
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I made a bit of a stroppy post the other evening about the sudden influx of emails I received from affiliate managers right after 5pm on a Friday. Julia Stent from Affiliate Window was kind enough to respond to my post and also give me permission to quote her response here. So here’s the relevant part of her email:
“Just wanted to send you a quick message about your post regarding Dixons emails on Friday night. First off - sorry about that, that was our team here!
“I thought it might be relevant to explain something to do with our email system (and I suspect other networks too). Sending out emails to the potentially thousands of affiliates joined to a programme puts a big load on our email server. If this is done during office hours, it can slow down our receiving external emails from affiliates. This means we have to delay sending out some programme notifications until after peak times.
“I realise this isn’t ideal, and believe me we are working on it! Already at the end of last year we added a whole batch of new servers but these were prioritised to tracking and reporting. I’m not an IT wizard but I suspect there’s a delay at our email supplier’s end as well.”
As a day-jobbing IT manager I can quite understand why Affiliate Window would want to send their bulk emails at a quieter time of day. I know one particular employee at my day job who seems to delight in jamming up our internet connection for an hour or so by sending large PDF files to 500 external contacts at the same time.
Equally, you’re never going to please all the people all the time. For every Monty who objects to Friday evening emails there’ll be A N Other Affiliate who prefers it that way.
So apologies to any affiliate managers who were offended by my first post. Obviously you have your reasons. It’s just that this particular Friday evening was a perfect storm of things annoying me and getting those emails was one of them.
What does anyone else think?
February 8th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
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