The DMA boosts email click rate by 54%, achieves a 98% inbox placement rate with Everest.
The Highlights:
98%
Average weighted inbox placement rate
54%
increase in click through rates
99
Average sender score
The challenge:
Maintaining high inbox placement rates in a complex email environment.
As a membership organization, the DMA relies on the email channel to build and maintain relationships with members.
“Email is our most effective customer relationship management channel. We use email for everything from influencing data legislation to promoting our educational webinars,” explained Shruti Gunjal, Head of Digital and Data Marketing at the DMA. “Communicating with our members is fundamental to them getting any value from us.”
But the unique nature of the DMA’s business makes maintaining a successful email program complicated. The email team must juggle both B2B and B2C audiences in its marketing outreach.
Furthermore, a complex customer decision-making unit makes list segmentation a challenge. The DMA’s customer database includes a wide range of job titles, including executive, human resources, legal, data, business development, and marketing roles.
“We send to so many email segments,” explained Gunjal. “While our volumes may be relatively small, our email needs are highly complex and sophisticated.”
Prior to partnering with Validity, the DMA team used a shared IP address infrastructure to send emails. This led to mounting deliverability issues and underwhelming email response rates.
While the DMA suspected its inbox placement rates were less than optimal, the organization lacked the visibility of email performance needed to identify and solve these issues.
The solution:
The Everest email success platform and Sender Certification program.
In early 2021, the DMA implemented Everest, the market-leading email success platform from Validity. With help from a dedicated customer success manager, the DMA team got up to speed quickly on the platform’s wide-ranging functionality.
The DMA now uses Everest’s list validation functionality as an integral part of its recency management strategy. List validation identifies inaccurate or problematic email addresses that might have otherwise compromised the DMA’s sender reputation.
“The list validation functionality means we now have much better intelligence to manage our active/inactive strategy—which is even more important now that Apple’s MPP is here,” explained Gunjal. “With Validity, I can literally pinpoint who to send to and who to ignore.”
The DMA’s new email templates are now run through the Everest platform’s design testing features. These features ensure messages can be viewed optimally through the various devices, screen sizes, and email clients used by DMA subscribers.
“Especially as we launch new content, testing for different views and screen sizes is vital,” explained Gunjal. “We love the security of knowing each template we send is perfect.”
Using the Everest platform’s comprehensive inbox placement testing, the DMA now enjoys full visibility of the most important mailbox providers, hosting platforms, and corporate spam filters that influence its deliverability.
With support from Validity, the DMA also migrated to a dedicated IP address. As a result, the organization gained clear visibility of its sender reputation metrics for the first time, and can now proactively address any issues that jeopardize email deliverability.
These improvements motivated the DMA to apply for Validity’s Sender Certification program. Following a rigorous audit process, the organization now enjoys preferential deliverability treatment with major global mailbox providers, and access to exclusive proprietary reporting data from the program’s global partners.
“The DMA and Validity share a passionate commitment to the ethical and responsible use of data to drive long-term customer engagement.”
Chris Combemale – Chief Executive Officer, The Data & Marketing Association
The results:
Across-the-board email success, driven by full visibility into email performance and a solid sender reputation.
After partnering with Validity, the DMA’s email performance improved across the board.
The organization now enjoys:
- An average sender score of 99
- Certified Microsoft inbox placement rates of 100 percent (Outlook.com and Office 365)
- Gmail inbox placement rates of 98 percent (Gmail and Google Workspace)
- 100 percent inbox placement at major filtering companies like Proofpoint and Mimecast
These providers represent over 90 percent of the DMA’s email activity, meaning the vast majority of both B2B and B2C members are benefiting from this improved performance.
Overall, the DMA now maintains an average weighted inbox placement rate of 98 percent, illustrating the organization’s blue-chip reputation with major mailbox providers, hosted corporate email platforms, and global spam filter vendors.
This outstanding performance has given the DMA confidence to introduce new segmentation tactics, enhanced email templates, and an updated email preference center. The combined impact of these efforts has significantly moved the needle towards higher subscriber engagement, and the DMA’s own key performance indicators highlight this positive impact.
This table compares engagement with the DMA’s email program during the 90-day periods before and after achieving Sender Certification. These results show the DMA’s subscribers are not only engaging more frequently with emails, but are now more responsive to the calls to action in those emails as well.
“Validity helps us understand how our customers respond to emails in great detail so we can keep improving. The data Validity provides via the Everest platform is so critical to the success of our email program, right down to understanding how Email Service Providers score us so we can rectify any issues.”
Rachel Whitter – Director of Customer Engagement, The Data & Marketing Association
The Data & Marketing Association (DMA) is the driving force of intelligent marketing in the United Kingdom. Guided by customer-first principles, the DMA champions a rich fusion of technology, diverse talent, creativity, and research to set the standard for the UK’s data and marketing community.
The DMA supports businesses through every stage of development, including:
- Mitigating data and marketing risks for businesses
- Unleashing business potential with marketing upskilling, using DMA resources, learning and qualifications
- Achieving sustainable growth with industry-recognized accreditation, networking, and partnerships
With over 1,000 corporate members, the DMA is Europe’s largest community of data-driven marketers.
