Bet365 Completes a Successful ESP Migration with Validity’s Email Deliverability Solutions and Expert Support. 

As a leader in the online gambling industry, the team at bet365 relies on email to keep their user base engaged. The company sends hundreds of millions of emails annually. 

Bet365’s emails feature a blend of traditional marketing messages—educating users about the platform, promoting relevant betting events, and communicating loyalty program updates—and transactional messages when users place bets. 

“Although we don’t use email as a lead acquisition tool, it’s still one of our most important marketing channels,” said Matthew Allen, Marketing Analyst at bet365. “It’s probably our most direct means of communication with our customers.” 

However, operating an email program in the gambling industry comes with unique challenges. 

The company must follow stringent industry regulations, including age restrictions, opt-in requirements (they can only market to their existing customer base), and the inclusion of legal notices and safe gambling advisories.  

Additionally, bet365 markets to over 40 countries worldwide, each with its own local marketing and gambling regulations, cultural norms, and deliverability challenges.  

“We have a lot of internal checks in place that must be completed before an email goes out. If you’re not prepared, marketing a gambling product be a bit of a minefield.”

These challenges all make bet365’s email deliverability (their ability to reach inboxes instead of spam folders) more difficult. The fact that some of their messages are legally required to be delivered successfully raised the stakes for their email performance even higher. 

As bet365’s email program continued its rapid-fire expansion (website traffic attributed email has increased by hundreds of millions year over year!), the company needed an email partner that could set them up for sustainable growth. 

Bet365 initially onboarded Validity’s legacy email solution, Return Path, before eventually upgrading to Everest, Validity’s next-generation email deliverability platform.

Allen and his team used Everest’s real-time deliverability insights, list validation, customizable alerts, and deep engagement metrics to ensure their campaigns were performing at or above expectations.  

“The alerts were particularly helpful in the aftermath of COVID-19,” Allen recalled. “We paused our campaigns temporarily and needed to slowly ramp up when things returned to normal—keeping a close eye on metrics like complaint rates and spam placement. We followed guidance from Validity and encountered no issues.” 

Bet365 also joined Validity’s Sender Certification program to further safeguard their sender reputation. Sender Certification is widely recognized by over 80 major global partners in the mailbox provider and spam filtering world as the industry’s most exclusive email allow-list, enabling senders to be recognized as safe and reputable sender by mailbox providers and spam filtering agencies. 

Among other benefits, Sender Certification protects bet365’s deliverability from the impact of occasional reputation dips. For example, during Safer Gambling Week, a cross-industry initiative to promote safe gambling, bet365 significantly increases its sending volume to communicate support for the cause to as many people as possible. Certification enables bet365 to increase their sending volume with peace of mind that they won’t encounter deliverability issues.  

As bet365’s growth continued, the need emerged for them to migrate to a new email service provider (ESP) that could better handle a program of their size. 

The team at bet365 was understandably apprehensive about entering the migration. This process is notoriously risky in terms of email deliverability. When switching providers, emails are usually sent from new IP addresses with no established sending reputation. If these IPs haven’t been properly warmed, sending large volumes of emails can trigger spam filters and result in low inbox placement, blocklistings, and even irreparably damage to the IP’s reputation. 

Given the vast number of IPs and sending domains across their global program, bet365’s migration promised to be difficult. “We had never undergone a warm-up of this scale before,” recalled Allen. 

During the process, bet365’s new ESP, Braze, recommended Validity’s Sender Certification program to safeguard the company’s email reputation throughout the migration. “There was a massive weight lifted off their shoulders when they realized we were already Certified,” said Allen.  

“We always had an awareness of deliverability’s importance, but Validity helped us to understand—and prevent—the wider consequences of getting it wrong.”