Event group Comexposium relies on Validity’s email marketing suite to optimize the delivery of its emails in the midst of a pandemic

Previously, each event operated independently and had its own email routing. This posed serious management challenges for deliverability optimization, as well as the tracking of campaigns with very diverse targets and timing (depending on the type of event). Most email volume is concentrated in a specific period around the event, and with much lower volumes during the rest of the year, sender reputation and sending performance were weaker during these periods. Therefore, with the objective of setting up a single platform for all trade shows, Comexposium developed an internal project called Data360. In doing so, the group was moving from an individual approach to a global one, using a common IP address and domain name for all trade shows.

The health crisis in 2020/2021 also posed many additional challenges for Comexposium. The group had to inform its audience of event postponements, often in a very short period of time, meaning periods of high campaign activity. From December 2020 to January 2021, email volumes more than tripled for Microsoft addresses, potentially creating negative performance issues for Sender Score and wider reputation metrics.

Furthermore, each show was run by an individual team with very different levels of data and marketing skills. Deliverability was managed externally, meaning the internal team at Comexposium had little training or visibility on data management and email best practices.

Since obtaining Certification, Comexposium has seen a real improvement in their deliverability performance, which they can now follow using the Validity interface. These deliverability measurement tools tell a clear story – since Certification, Comexposium has experienced 100% inbox placement rates (IPRs) with Microsoft addresses (up from 62% in 2019). These addresses are particularly important for Comexposium, as their professional events gather lots of Outlook emails during registration. While rapid increases in volume like this will often lead to corresponding increases in complaint activity, Certification and the support of Validity’s experts meant Comexposium was able to maintain complaint rates at levels consistent with their 0.4% long-term average – an outstanding achievement.

Figures are also very satisfying with other MBPs. Yahoo IPRs increased from 77% to 95% over the same period, while Gmail IPRs increased from 82% to 99%. This also showcases the work done by Validity’s experts. They helped Comexposium to implement new best practices to improve their email performance since the beginning of the collaboration in 2019, and have continued to do so since Certification was obtained in November 2020.

Despite the long period of inactivity, mailings of the deferred emails – some to large bases – went very well, while Comexposium’s previous process would have led to heavy temporary blocking. Despite the pandemic delaying the initial IP warmup, Comexposium has already been able to integrate the three pilot shows onto the new platform, and all 60 annual French shows are set to follow.

With the Everest integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Comexposium can continue to autoseed their campaigns to receive detailed inbox placement results without the added time and burden associated with manual seeding. By combining the campaign data they receive from Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Everest’s deliverability metrics, they can easily correlate events and identify problem areas.

The group is currently focusing on training its teams and becoming familiar with the tool, and with the help of AI, they would like to be able to go further in personalization.