Queue

Definition: In email marketing, a queue is a sequence or system used to manage and organize the scheduling of email campaigns. Email queues are often employed by email service providers (ESPs) to distribute large volumes of emails over a certain time frame, ensuring that messages are sent at optimal times for user engagement. 

These queues help marketers stagger email sends, ensuring they don’t overload the system or spam recipients with too many emails at once. Email queues can also be used for triggering automated sequences, where emails are queued up to send based on a subscriber’s behavior, such as when they sign up, abandon a cart, or download a resource.

Example: A marketing team uses an email queue to schedule a series of follow-up emails to new subscribers over the course of a week. The emails are queued so they don’t all send at once, ensuring the recipient’s inbox doesn’t become overwhelmed, and each email is sent at the most relevant time in the user’s journey.