Our marketing team is leveraging mailchimp to send out marketing materials to current users on behalf of us@ourcompany.com. We welcome those users to respond if they want to move forward with an offer, and then we provide details and move conversations towards conversions etc.
Our issue is that we are reaching our sending limits within the first hour of each day – we're essentially bottlenecked by the sending limits as we respond to folks who are replying to our promotions.
I'm responsible for finding a solution to this that enables us to send out effectively unlimited responses using our Google apps account (or moving our email address to a different provider) – without building our own server.
What's the typical 'growth step' that folks have followed in this situation?
Update
I've contacted google support through the Admin console of my Apps account and they've explained that until $30 is paid (we had 5 users sign up last month = $25), the trial limits will be applied. You can reset the throttling yourself by clicking on the account that's being throttled, clicking the yellow notification icon in the upper right corner, and then clicking "reset". Paying an additional $5 into the account increases the throttling limit to 2000 per docs in 24-48 hrs.
Best Answer
The sending limits for Google Apps accounts (paid version) are normally rather high and reaching them within an hour is challenging: https://support.google.com/a/answer/166852?hl=en
I suggest, if not done, to move to Google for Work (the paid version) as the free legacy version has limits you can in fact easily reach.
Alternatively you can messages via another service as you have already mentioned MailChimp. Here are some more links from the Google Help Forum: