Prioritize your messages at scale with the Twilio Traffic Optimization Engine

Prioritize your messages at scale with the Twilio Traffic Optimization Engine
August 23, 2023
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You count on Twilio to get your messages delivered on time, every time. As more and more business interactions move to messaging, there’s pressure on the finite resources of networks. Sending messages to consumers is no longer just about reaching their phone screen, but sending timely, thoughtful, and impactful messages to drive meaningful engagement globally.

As messaging volumes sent through Twilio have soared, we’ve doubled down on our investment in messaging quality for all of our customers. That includes our Traffic Optimization Engine, a new suite of products to help you achieve global messaging deliverability and prioritization at scale.

Whether you’re scaling geographically, expanding use cases, adding new sender types, or growing the sheer volume of messages you send, you may begin to run into deliverability and messaging throughput issues caused by the strain on the carriers’ networks and how your messages are prioritized and delivered. A prime example of this is the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2022, nearly 4 billion messages were sent to consumers via Twilio in that week alone.

Building a messaging platform for global scale and reliability

Some of our largest and fastest-growing customers have more intensive needs when it comes to scaling their messaging, and sometimes require a more hands-on approach from our product and engineering teams. To ensure deliverability at scale during big sending opportunities like Cyber Week, we spend months partnering with our customers to architect their messaging solutions. But we asked ourselves: what if that same level of planning and scale could happen automatically and throughout the year?

The Traffic Optimization Engine now enables you to do just that. This suite of products works across different networks, senders, geographies, and use cases to ensure that your most timely messages are delivered based on your highest priority needs and without overwhelming the carrier networks. This means that your messages will always be delivered in the time you and your customers expect – something other providers can’t always do.

Our system of traffic shaping and priority queueing is based on the capabilities of each carrier, each sender, and each message type, which allows us to ensure that one-time passwords, for example, get through quickly while marketing messages send within a reasonable timeframe and are cost effective.

What’s inside the Traffic Optimization Engine?

The Traffic Optimization Engine consists of a range of features and products that work together, or individually, to give you granular control over your messaging deliverability, throughput allocation, and prioritization of their messaging solution at scale. Each of these products works seamlessly with our Programmable Messaging API and is implemented in partnership with our Product and Engineering teams, ensuring that you’ll have personalized support in achieving deliverability at scale. The features included are:

  • Real-time Routing - Generally available
    Patented algorithms optimize your messaging traffic for maximum deliverability across 4,800+ carrier connections every 75 seconds, ensuring deliverability even when you’re sending high-volume messaging traffic.
  • Multitenancy - Private beta
    This tool dynamically assigns equal messaging throughput across all teams or customers of an independent software vendor (ISV) to ensure fair distribution of throughput across messages. This allows you to balance your traffic for optimum sending across all use cases, internal teams, or customers using your platform.
  • Market Throughput - Public beta
    A throughput architecture structure places per-country rate limits for each sender type instead of at the individual sender level to reduce overhead for global delivery. Market Throughput enables you to have more control over which use cases and sender types are prioritized by country. For example, architecting your messaging solution so that your timely verification messages over short codes in the U.S. have prioritized deliverability over your promotional messages sent from your toll-free numbers to ensure the high-priority verifications are delivered first.
  • Traffic Shaping - Private beta
    Traffic Shaping creates dynamic traffic lanes in order to protect your messaging, and allows you to prioritize and categorize your messages by country and sender type to enable more seamless deliverability for your high-priority messages.
  • Insights - Generally available
    Insights gives you real-time, out-of-the-box analytics and reporting on messaging deliverability, capacity allocation, and queuing so you have more granular insights into the performance of your global messaging traffic.

The Traffic Optimization Engine is built for all Twilio customers, and if you’re growing your messaging solution globally, have encountered messaging delays, long queue lengths for high-priority messages, or want to gain more control of how your messages achieve optimum delivery, you may be eligible for our products currently in beta. Reach out today or talk with your Twilio account team to see how you can begin architecting your messaging solutions for global scale.