3 Critical Email Strategies for Retailers as Bulk-Send Limits Tighten
Online shopping is now firmly ensconced in the American retail landscape. With total sales hitting nearly $1.2 trillion in 2024, breaking the $1 trillion mark for the third year in a row, online retail has continued to take a commanding share of all retail spending. Yet its dominance is a double-edged sword, as it has brought a new level of technological complexity to the retail industry. Any disruption to the myriad of systems that keep e-commerce running could risk not only immediate losses in sales but also longer-term damage to a retailer’s reputation and customer loyalty.
As technology leaders prioritize efforts to keep their platforms running efficiently and reliably, they must not allow a fundamental component of the customer journey to become a blind spot: email. B2C emails for confirmations, invoices, and marketing need flexible solutions for time-sensitive, scalable, reliable and process-driven communications. Recent developments by major email providers could, without adequate planning and attention, create unforeseen challenges for retailers. Here’s how the landscape is shifting and what retailers need to do to prevent disruption for their customers.
The Hidden Value of Email for Retailers …
Email has been central to the success of e-commerce by giving retailers a reliable, low-cost, and instantaneous communications channel. Even as other forms of messaging have evolved, email remains the primary choice for reaching customers.
Today, retailers rely on email to send customers everything from order confirmations to marketing campaigns to account security alerts. These touchpoints are not just convenient; they deliver real business value. Instant order confirmations and shipping updates reduce support inquiries and improve customer trust in delivery. Cart abandonment messages help to improve conversion rates. Password reset and one-time passcode emails ensure customer data is secured. Personalized sale alerts drive new purchases more effectively than bulk-mailing the latest deals.
… And the Hidden Cost of Failure
Imagine, then, if the technology responsible for sending those emails wasn't fit for purpose. Customers could be left wondering whether their purchases went through if confirmation emails failed to send on time, or at all. Returning shoppers attempting to log into their accounts might abandon their efforts if their one-time password ends up buried in a junk email folder. And what good are personalized marketing campaigns if the intended audience never gets a chance to see the offered discounts?
New Risks to Effective Retail Email
In addition to these ever-present risks, new policies and sending limits by email providers have created new potential roadblocks for retail tech leaders. In March, Microsoft announced new restrictions on how many emails could be sent to recipients outside of a tenant organization, with the highest outbound sending limit capped at 1.5 million emails per day.
These figures might seem far out of reach to the average user, but a large retail brand could hit that limit by lunchtime. Consider how many order confirmations might be sent out by the country’s biggest electronics retailer on Black Friday, or the number of back-to-school promotions that a stationery store would need to send as summer vacations begin to wind down. Any form of sending limits can look very restrictive indeed.
Microsoft’s new limits are just one roadblock for effective email in the retail industry. Other providers apply even tighter constraints on consumer and small-business tiers.
3 Steps to Keep Emails Flowing
When in-house mail servers and standard cloud platforms buckle under these rules, retailers must consider three crucial steps to ensure their email continues uninterrupted:
1. Segment the streams.
The most efficient way to manage email is to envision two lanes on a highway. Critical communications (e.g., order confirmations, password resets and payment alerts) keep revenue moving in the fast lane on the left. Traveling in the right lane, promotional blasts, newsletter updates, and seasonal catalogs still get where they need to go, and quickly, just without impeding critical messages. Tagging and routing critical emails through a dedicated domain or API key ensures that a surge of sale announcements doesn’t clog the system and delay a customer’s “Your item has shipped!” note.
2. Partner with a high-volume provider.
Specialized, experienced, and cloud-based providers absorb the tidal waves of high-volume email. A high-performance platform guarantees over 98 percent delivery rates with no caps on capacity. Partnering with a specialist gives retailers built-in control and deep deliverability monitoring and analytics so they can spot and fix any bottlenecks before they cost them millions in abandoned carts.
3. Invest in reputation management.
A retailer’s send reputation is one of its most precious assets, and maintaining it requires the constant monitoring of critical metrics like bounce rates, spam scoring, and engagement. Tech leaders should also ensure their teams are enforcing strict SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies and keeping recipient lists clean. If a message does go astray, retailers should be able to deploy trace-and-recover tools to locate and re-deliver individual emails with a single click, ensuring no customer is left behind.
Retail’s shift online has made email the lifeblood of customer experience. As inbox providers tighten their grip on bulk sends, the risk of a communication blackout grows ever more real. Technology leaders who proactively segment urgent flows, partner with scalable platforms, and safeguard their sender reputation will keep their brands connected, even when the tide of messages surges. In the fast-moving world of e-commerce, staying ahead of email limits isn’t just a technical detail; it’s a competitive imperative.
Oliver Paetz is the head of product management, transactional email for Retarus, a provider of enterprise cloud solutions for email, fax, and SMS.
